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SF&F encyclopedia (D-D)


DAGMAR
Lou CAMERON.

DAGMAR, PETER
Frank J. PINCHIN.

DAGNOL, JULES N.
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.

DAHL, ROALD
(1916-1990) Welsh-born writer of Norwegian parents who spent periods of
his life in the USA, but lived in the UK in his later years; married to
the actress Patricia Neal 1953-83. Though his enormous success as an
author of children's stories tended to dominate perceptions of his career,
he was in fact long best known for his eerie, exquisitely crafted,
somewhat poisonous adult tales, many of them fantasies, assembled in
Someone Like You (coll 1953 US; exp 1961 UK), Kiss Kiss (coll 1960 US),
Switch Bitch (coll 1974 US) and several later collections which often
included previous material: The Best of Roald Dahl (coll 1978 US); Tales
of the Unexpected (coll 1979) and More Roald Dahl Tales of the Unexpected
(coll 1980; vt More Tales of the Unexpected 1980; vt Further Tales of the
Unexpected 1981), both assembled as Roald Dahl's Completely Unexpected
Tales (omni 1986); Two Fables (coll 1986 chap); Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life
(coll 1989); and the posthumous The Collected Short Stories (coll 1991),
which includes further work. Not infrequently these stories make use of
borderline sf images, such as the unpleasant metamorphosis of human into
bee in "Royal Jelly" (1960); but more generally it is the threat of sf or
supernatural displacement that powers them.RD's first title was a
children's fantasy, The Gremlins (1943 chap US), a short story that became
famous because Walt Disney dickered for a time with making an animated
film of it (there is no connection with the much later Joe DANTE film
Gremlins). His only sf novel, Some Time Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948
US), by some margin his worst book, recasts the tale for an adult
audience. After attempting to sabotage humanity during WWII, the
long-submerged gremlins see that we ourselves are doing the job quite
adequately; they take back control of the planet after the nuclear WWIV,
but then become extinct in a world bare of humanity. The strained and sour
whimsy of this "fable" might be seen - according to RD's critics - as
passing directly into his juvenile fantasies, though it would probably be
fairer to acknowledge a world of difference between adult spitefulness and
the exuberant child's-eye view of grown-ups and the meting of justice unto
them presented in James and the Giant Peach (1961 US) and all its
successors, the most famous being Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964
US), filmed as Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971); it was
assembled with its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972 US),
as The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr Willy Wonka (omni 1987). RD
also wrote the screenplay for the James Bond film YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
(1967). One late novel for adults followed, the quasi-historical,
borderline- STEAMPUNK My Uncle Oswald (1979), which plays with the notion
of "tapping" geniuses such as Freud and Shaw for purposes of artificial
insemination - spermpunk, in short.But the adult work was, in the end,
miserly; the stories for children were, in the end, generously wicked
gifts of fable. [JC]Other works for adults: Over to You (coll 1946 US),
associational; Twenty-Nine Kisses from Roald Dahl (coll 1969), a
compilation; Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) and Going Solo (1986),
autobiographical; Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (anth 1983).For
children: The Magic Finger (1966 chap US); Fantastic Mr Fox (1970 chap);
Danny, the Champion of the World (1975); The Wonderful Story of Henry
Sugar and Six More (coll 1977; vt The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar 1977
US); The Enormous Crocodile (1978); The Twits (1980 chap); George's
Marvellous Medicine (1981); The BFG (1982); The Witches (1983); The
Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (1985); Matilda (1988); Esio Trot (1990
chap), associational; The Minipins (1991 chap).About the author: Roald
Dahl (1983) by Chris Dowling.See also: HUMOUR; SATIRE.

DAIBER, ALBERT
[r] GERMANY.

DAIKAIJU GAMERA
(vt Gamera) Film (1966). Daiei. Dir Noriaki Yuasa, starring Eiji
Funakoshi, Harumi Kiritachi (and, in the US version, Brian Donlevy, Albert
Dekker, Diane Findlay). Screenplay Fumi Takahashi. 88 mins. Colour.This
was Daiei Studios' answer to the enormously successful GOJIRA ["Godzilla"]
films from Toho Studios. Gamera is a giant prehistoric turtle, restored to
life by nuclear testing. It attacks Tokyo, naturally, but is captured and
sent into space. The US version had extra footage showing Americans, not
Japanese, discovering how to eliminate Gamera! The Gamera films were,
apart from the Gojira films, Japan's most successful MONSTER MOVIES. The 6
sequels, all dir Yuasa except the first (for which he did the special
effects), are: Gamera Tai Barugon (1966), dir Shigeo Tanaka, released in
English as Gamera vs. Barugon, in which Gamera returns from space, now
apparently jet-propelled, and fights a giant lizard that has a lethal
rainbow field around it; Gamera Tai Gaos (1967; vt Daikaiju Kuchusen),
released in English as Gamera vs. Gaos (vt The Return of the Giant
Monsters), in which Gaos is a bad scaly monster that hates sunlight and
Gamera (like Godzilla, he rapidly became a good monster) saves children;
Gamera Tai Viras (1968; vt Gamera Tai Uchukaiju Bairasu), released in
English as Gamera vs. Viras (vt Gamera Versus Outer Space Monster Viras;
vt Destroy All Planets), in which two boy scouts save Gamera from alien
control; Gamera Tai Guiron (1969), released in English as Gamera vs.
Guiron (vt Attack of the Monsters), in which Gamera saves children from
brain-eating female aliens and their knife-headed monster; Gamera Tai
Daimaju Jaiga (1970), released in English as Gamera vs. Jiger (vt Gamera
vs. Monster X; vt Monsters Invade Expo 70), in which nasty Jiger lays an
egg inside Gamera, a parasite hatches and starts sucking his blood, and
children in a mini-submarine enter his veins to help out; and Gamera Tai
Shinkai Kaiju Jigura (1971), released in English as Gamera vs. Zigra (vt
Gamera Versus the Deep Sea Monster Zigra), in which there is an
anti-pollution theme, bad aliens, and a very bad script. [PN]See also:
CINEMA.

DAIKAIJU KUCHUSEN
DAIKAIJU GAMERA.

DAIL, C(HARLES) C(URTIS)
(1851-1902) US writer and lawyer whose Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man
from Saturn (1890; rev c1891) is a real oddity. Though told with no great
skill, its narrative, purporting to be that of Willmoth the Saturnian as
told towards the end of his several-million-year lifespan, is an eventful
affair. Willmoth proceeds from Saturn to Venus (travel via ANTIGRAVITY)
and, late in the book, to a prehistoric Earth, whose primitive inhabitants
he breeds into Homo sapiens. CCD's episodic second novel, The Stone Giant:
A Story of the Mammoth Cave (1898), lies within the overarching context of
the first book. It is presented as a translation (by Willmoth) of memoirs
by the prehistoric ruler Wymorian, an 8ft (2.4m) giant and founder of
ATLANTIS, who is given (by ancient descendants of Willmoth) an elixir of
life. There is much talk about the ethics of the IMMORTALITY experiment,
which on the whole is a failure - as, notoriously, was Atlantis. [PN/JC]

DAIN, ALEX
Pseudonym of Alex Lukeman (? -? ), US writer whose sf novel is The Bane
of Kanthos (1969 dos), a SPACE OPERA. [JC]

DAKE, CHARLES ROMYN
(? -? ) US writer whose lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novel, A Strange
Discovery (1899), features a Roman colony in the Antarctic and is notable
in that it continues the story of Edgar Allan POE's Gordon Pym. [JC]

DALE, ADAM
Brian HOLLOWAY.

DALE, FLOYD D.
(? - ) US writer whose first work, A Hunter's Fire (1989), is a post-
HOLOCAUST military-sf adventure. [JC]

DALEKS
These sinister ALIENS, bent on universal conquest, mutated and rendered
immobile by radioactivity, inhabit metal transporters to become CYBORGS.
They were introduced in the tv series DOCTOR WHO by writer Terry NATION in
The Dead Planet (1963-4), the long-running programme's second story, later
filmed as DR WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965); another 1964 tv story was filmed
as DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D. (1966). The Daleks returned in many Dr
Who tv episodes, being the most popular feature of its first decade; only
in 1975 did we learn, in Genesis of the Daleks, that they had been created
by an evil, crippled genius, Davros. [PN]

DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D.
(vt Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.) Film (1966). AARU. Dir Gordon Flemyng,
starring Peter Cushing, Bernard Cribbins, Roberta Tovey, Jill Curzon.
Screenplay Milton Subotsky, based on a 6-episode DR WHO tv story by Terry
NATION, The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964). 84 mins. Colour.This was the
second movie made by coproducers Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg to
cash in on the popularity of the Dr Who tv series, the first being DR WHO
AND THE DALEKS (1965). The DALEKS, almost 200 years on, have invaded Earth
(largely unchanged since the 1960s) intending to empty its core and use it
as a giant spaceship, but Dr Who and his colleagues, who include a London
bobby (Cribbins) from 1966, thwart their plan in a story devoid of
dramatic tension or science: Earth's north and south magnetic fields, we
are told, meet below Bedfordshire, and can be used to suck the Daleks into
oblivion at Earth's centre. The greatest ineptness of the screenplay is
its failure to give Dr Who, here played as a doddery old gent by Cushing,
anything at all to do. [PN]

DALEY, BRIAN C.
(1947- ) US writer whose first novels were the SCIENCE-FANTASY Coramonde
sequence - The Doomfarers of Coramonde (1977) and The Starfollowers of
Coramonde (1979) - which puts into an ALTERNATE-WORLD setting a tale of
MAGIC, court politics and quest, starring a Vietnam veteran who helps his
friend, the rightful ruler, fight off an evil sorcerer. Of slightly
greater sf interest is the Alacrity FitzHugh sequence - Requiem for a
Ruler of Worlds (1985), Jinx on a Terran Inheritance (1985) and Fall of
the White Ship Avatar (1986) - whose hero, Alacrity, hurtles through sf
adventures on a galactic scale. BCD's best single novel has perhaps been A
Tapestry of Magics (1983), a fantasy whose central conceit - a tapestry
which is also a magical singularity - recursively recruits into the tale,
from various eons and realities, characters both real and fictional,
including some of Robert A. HEINLEIN's, perhaps in acknowledgement of
Heinlein's own RECURSIVE later fiction.BCD remains best known, however,
for his highly competent and colourful Star Wars ties, Han Solo at Star's
End * (1979), Han Solo's Revenge * (1979) and Han Solo and the Lost Legacy
* (1980), which admirably set out to infill Solo's pre-saga life, and
which were assembled as Star Wars: The Han Solo Adventures (omni 1992);
Star Wars: The NPR Radio Dramatization *(1994) is a radio play. Other ties
include Tron * (1982) ( TRON) and the two sequences of Robotech tv ties
with James Luceno, writing together as Jack McKinney: the first comprises
Robotech #1: Genesis * (1987), #2: Battle Cry * (1987), #3: Homecoming *
(1987), #4: Battlehymn * (1987), #5: Force of Arms * (1987), #6: Doomsday
* (1987), #7: Southern Cross * (1987), #8: Metal Fire * (1987), #9: The
Final Nightmare * (1987), #10: Invid Invasion * (1987), #11: Metamorphosis
* (1987) and #12: Symphony of Light * (1987); the second sequence, the
Sentinels books, comprises The Sentinels #1: The Devil's Hand * (1988),
#2: Dark Powers * (1988), #3: Death Dance * (1988), #4: World Killers *
(1988) and #5: Rubicon * (1988); both sequences conclude with Robotech:
The End of the Circle * (1990). Luceno and BCD, both still writing as Jack
McKinney, continued with some independent titles: Kaduna Memories (1990),
about a detective in 21st-century Manhattan, and the first volumes of the
Black Hole Travel Agency sequence, Event Horizon (1991),Artifact of the
System (1991),The Big Empty (1993) and The Shadow * (1994), a film tie. It
could not be argued that BCD has much built upon the promise of his first
books, but nor could it be said that he has ever given bad value. He has
become one of the necessary journeymen. [JC]

DALGAARD, NIELS
(1956- ) Danish academic and sf critic whose PhD research into Danish sf
is the first on such a topic to be funded by the Danish Research Council
for the Humanities. ND is sf reviewer for the newspaper Politiken and
editor of the critical journal Proxima (since 1981). He wrote the DENMARK
entry in this volume. [PN]

DALMAS, JOHN
Pseudonym for all his fiction of US writer John R(obert) Jones (1926- ),
whose first career was as a research ecologist for the US Forest Service.
He began publishing with The Yngling (1969 ASF; fixup 1971; rev 1984),
which, with its prequel, Homecoming (1984) - both assembled as The Orc
Wars (omni 1992) - depicts a barbarian future whose history echoes that of
the eponymous Norse kings of legend; eventually the hero of the saga leads
his neo-Vikings south from the encroaching ice, though their ideal
community is soon under threat; The Yngling and the Circle of Power (1992)
is a prequel. In the Fanglith series - Fanglith (1985) and Return to
Fanglith (1987) - the planet to which criminals are exiled turns out to be
Earth; much of JD's work similarly transforms SPACE-OPERA venues into
arenas where ironies (or the gods) have free play. In both The Reality
Matrix (1986) and, with Rod Martin (1928- ), The Playmasters (1986) this
drift of implication becomes explicit. The Regiment sequence -
comprisingThe Regiment (1987), The White Regiment (1990) and The
Regiment's War (1993) - tells, a group of mercenaries from a military
planet sent off to fight until they all die - characters, once again, who
are players in others' games. The General's President (1988) interestingly
assumes that a US civilian puppet-leader might convincingly fox his
military backers. Though his work is teasingly close to routine, JD is too
various and lively to dismiss.Other works: The Varkaus Conspiracy (1983);
Touch the Stars: Emergence (1983) with Carl Martin (1950- ); The Scroll of
Man (1985); The Walkaway Clause (1986); The Lantern of God (1989); The
Lizard War (1989); The Khalif's War (1991).

DALOS, GYORGY (ALFRED)
(1943- ) Hungarian writer, who suffered the usual persecutions (he was
expelled from theCommunist Party in 1968 as a "dissident") before writing
1985: A Historical Report(Hongkong 2036) from the Hungarian of * * *
(trans Stuart Hood and Estella Schmid1983 UK), a tale which did not appear
in his native land, or in its original language, duringthe period of
Soviet hegemony. It is an extremely sprightly SATIRE on conditions inhis
native land, in the form of a sequel to George ORWELL's NINETEEN
EIGHTY-FOUR(1949), recounting the death of Big Brother, aninterval of
thaw, and once again a clenching of the iron fist. [JC]

DALTON, HENRY ROBERT S(AMUEL)
(1835-? ) UK writer, active to about 1890, whose sf novel Lesbia Newman
(1889) depicts a profound change in UK social attitudes after a disastrous
1890s loss of territory to European powers and the USA, as a consequence
of which the eponymous female manages to seduce the Ecumenical Council of
1900 into proclaiming the worship of women. [JC]

DALTON, SEAN
Jay D. BLAKENEY.

DALY, HAMLIN
[s] E. Hoffmann PRICE.

DAMNATION ALLEY
Film (1977). Landers-Roberts/Zeitman/20th Century-Fox. Dir Jack Smight,
starring Jan-Michael Vincent, George Peppard, Dominique Sanda. Screenplay
Alan Sharp, Lukas Heller, based on Damnation Alley (1969) by Roger
ZELAZNY. 95 mins cut to 91 mins. Colour.In this travesty the solitary,
snarling, Hell's Angel protagonist of Zelazny's novel has become four
fairly decent Air Force officers. There are almost no survivors of WWIII.
The officers set out from the western USA to cross the country eastwards
in "land-mobiles", seeking viable communities. The HOLOCAUST has tilted
Earth's axis, turning the sky into a display of glowing radiation and
electrical storms, represented by astonishingly garish and inadequate
process work from an obviously low-budget special-effects department. The
encounter with mutated, carnivorous cockroaches stands out in an otherwise
wholly laughable and random series of stereotyped adventures with
murderous hillbillies, floods, a girl, a feral boy and several deaths.
[PN]

DAMNED, THE
(vt These Are the Damned) Film (1961). Hammer/Swallow. Dir Joseph Losey,
starring MacDonald Carey, Oliver Reed, Shirley Ann Field, Viveca Lindfors,
Alexander Knox. Screenplay Evan Jones, based on The Children of Light
(1960) by Henry L. LAWRENCE. 96 mins, cut to 87 mins (UK) and to 77 mins
(US). B/w.Made in the UK by expatriate US director Losey, this film so
dismayed the distributors, Columbia, that they kept it on the shelf for
two years before releasing it, and then with major cuts. A US visitor to
an English seaside town (Carey) becomes involved with the sister (Field)
of the leader of some tough, local bikers. The pair accidentally learn of
a secret, illegal military project to irradiate children kept in
underground isolation, thereby rendering them capable of surviving nuclear
HOLOCAUST. (The otherwise powerful film is partly devalued by Losey's
casual approach to science; gaffes include the belief that the irradiated
children would have abnormally low body temperatures but be otherwise
healthy!) Ironically, Carey and Field are fatally contaminated by the very
children they seek to free. Losey's moral indignation has a paranoid
streak, but the film's evocative, allusive imagery is strong, in
particular when the children communicate with their obsessed, scientist
"father" (Knox) by tv and in the final shots, showing a helicopter
hovering like a giant carrion bird over the small boat carrying the dying
couple - echoing the grotesque, sometimes bird-like sculptures executed by
the scientist's lover (in reality by distinguished sculptress Elisabeth
Frink), which stand on the clifftops nearby. TD is one of the most
memorable sf films of a period when few really good directors would come
within miles of the genre. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA.

DAMRON, HILLEL
[r] ISRAEL.

DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE
UK sf COMIC-strip character, distinguished in appearance by his long chin
and by the zigzag on the outer end of each eyebrow. DD was created by
Frank HAMPSON for the weekly boys' comic Eagle, in which - with the
sobriquet "Pilot of the Future" - he appeared with his Lancastrian batman
Digby from 1950 until the comic's demise in 1969. Hampson supervised a
team of writers, artists, model-makers and photographers to create a
totally convincing scenario of the future, as governed by the United
Nations Organization. Writers included Eric Eden, David Motton, Alan
Stranks and Chad Varah; artists included Frank Bellamy, Bruce Cornwell,
Eric Eden, Donald Harley, Harold Johns, Desmond Walduck and Keith Watson.
DD stories generally dealt with the exploration of the Solar System,
individual stories often centring on conflicts between DD and the Mekon, a
green-skinned, dome-headed Venusian despot. Under Hampson's firm control,
pictorial authenticity was achieved through the use of scale models, and
characters were drawn from photographs of real people; stories were
scrutinized for scientific accuracy (Arthur C. CLARKE was adviser for the
first six months).After Hampson's departure in 1959 the writers extended
their themes beyond the limitations of the original conception in a series
of less convincing adventures across the Galaxy. Continuity became
strained and, despite a period of revitalization at the hands of Keith
Watson, the strip declined, no new material being published after Jan
1967. A DD newspaper strip of 7 frames per week was published in the UK
Sunday newspaper The People 3 May-26 Nov 1964.Written by Tom Tulley and
drawn at first by Massimo Belardinelli and subsequently by Dave GIBBONS,
the character was revived in name only in 2,000 AD (from #1, 26 Feb 1977).
The voluble adverse reaction to this from fans of the original strip,
along with news of plans for a nostalgic DD tv series (to be produced by
Paul de Savary), persuaded IPC, Eagle's erstwhile publisher, to relaunch
Eagle in 1982 as a weekly pulp comic with new DD stories featuring the
"great grandson" of the original DD. At first top-line artists were used -
Gerry Embleton (although he quickly became disillusioned by inconsistent
editorial directives and left) and then Ian Kennedy (until 1984) - but the
series failed to recreate the credibility of the original, and for a time
IPC used less able artists on it until, for a six-week period in 1989,
they returned once more to Hampson's original conception (with Keith
Watson as artist). The new incarnation of Eagle failed to achieve
significant sales and became a monthly, reprinting earlier strips
alongside new DD stories written by Tom Tulley and drawn by David Pugh; it
still (early 1992) survives.In 1982 de Savary's tv series was abandoned
unfinished, although a different DD tv series is (early 1992) in the
process of production by Zenith Films. There have been two RADIO
adaptations: the first, starring Noel Johnson, ran continuously on Radio
Luxembourg 2 July 1951-25 May 1956; the second, starring Nick Ward,
adapted Eagle's original DD story and was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in
1990. Book-length reprints of Hampson's DD stories have been published by
Dragon's Dream - The Man from Nowhere (graph 1979), Rogue Planet (graph
1980) and Reign of the Robots (graph 1981) - and by Hawk Books - Pilot of
the Future (graph 1987), Red Moon Mystery & Marooned on Mercury (graph
omni 1988), Operation Saturn (graph 1989), Prisoners of Space (graph 1990)
and The Man from Nowhere (graph 1991). DD also starred in a political-
SATIRE comic strip written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Rian Hughes,
which appeared 1990-91 in Revolver and Crisis and was published in book
form as Dare (graph 1991). A comic-strip parody of DD, lampooning
contemporary UK politics, ran as Dan Dire - Pilot of the Future in 1991 in
the satirical magazine Private Eye. There have also been two novels: Dan
Dare on Mars * (1956) by Basil Dawson and Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future *
(1977) by Angus Allen, the latter a novelization of the original Eagle
story.For more on DD's creator read The Man who Drew Tomorrow (1985) by
Alastair Crompton, and for more on the character read The Dan Dare Dossier
(1990). [RT/ABP/JE]

DANE, CLEMENCE
Pseudonym of UK playwright and novelist Winifred Ashton (1888-1965), best
remembered for Broome Stages (1931), a tale of the theatre. She became
known to the sf world late in life when she edited the Novels of Tomorrow
series in 1955-6 for Michael Joseph Ltd, publishing work by John
CHRISTOPHER, Harold MEAD and Arthur SELLINGS. Some of her own fiction was
of genre interest. Legend (1919) concerns a supernatural relationship
between a dead writer and her biographer. The Babyons (1927) traces a
curse through four generations. The Arrogant History of White Ben (1939),
set in a beleaguered NEAR FUTURE, gives an animate scarecrow the task of
leading the UK out of trouble. In The Saviours (coll of linked plays 1942)
Merlin attempts to revitalize Britain by giving Arthur's heirs good
advice. Some of the stories assembled in Fate Cries Out (coll 1935) are of
genre interest. [JC]

DANGER: DIABOLIK
DIABOLIK.

DANGERFIELD, PAUL
Victor NORWOOD.

DANGEROUS VISIONS
Original ANTHOLOGY ed Harlan ELLISON. DV (1967) was a massive and
influential anthology of 33 stories and copious prefatory material; it
became strongly identified with the NEW WAVE in the USA. Among its
stories, "Aye, and Gomorrah . . ." by Samuel R. DELANY, "Gonna Roll the
Bones" by Fritz LEIBER and "Riders of the Purple Wage" by Philip Jose
FARMER won major awards. DV was followed by Again, Dangerous Visions (anth
1972), which was larger still, although it created less stir. It contained
two more major-award winners, "When It Changed" by Joanna RUSS and THE
WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972; 1976) by Ursula K. LE GUIN, among its 46
stories. ADV used only authors who had not appeared in DV. A third and
still unpublished instalment, again with wholly new authors - The Last
Dangerous Visions - has become legendary for its many postponements over
19 years (to 1992), although Ellison is on record (1979) as saying that
over 100 stories were bought for it. One sternly adversarial account of
its history is the widely discussed The Last Deadloss Visions (1987 chap;
rev 1987) compiled/written and published by Christopher PRIEST.
[MJE/PN]See also: TABOOS.

DANIEL, GABRIEL
(1649-1728) French writer whose Voyage du Monde de Descartes (1690; trans
T. Taylor as A Voyage to the World of Cartesius 1692 UK) is a FANTASTIC
VOYAGE whose purpose was to popularize the ideas of the philosopher Rene
Descartes (1596-1650) on COSMOLOGY and other matters. [PN]See also: PROTO
SCIENCE FICTION; SPACE FLIGHT.

DANIEL, TONY
(1963- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "For the Killed
Astronauts" for IASFM in 1990, and who has been fairly prolific in the
1990s. His first novel, Warpath (1991 IASFM as "Candle"; exp 1993), was
admired for its ambitious scope, though it seems at points overloaded with
material, and slides (at points uncontrolledly) from sf to MAGIC REALISM
to myth (mostly based on Native American material) to and outright
fantasy. The premise is romantic: centuries past, Mississippi Native
Americans have learned to convey their canoes on interstellar voyages, and
have settled the planet Candle. The inevitable arrival of
technology-dominated human civilizations provides the engine of a plot
which incorporates god-like bear-shaped companions, demon-like sorcerers,
weather-manipulation governed the sentience of a dead lover, and much
else. None of it works as a whole; but the parts are enough to establish
TD as a significant new writer of the 1990s. [JC]

DANIEL, YULI (MARKOVICH)
(1925-1988) Russian author who wrote as Nikolai Arzhak; he lived in exile
after having been imprisoned in 1966 along with his dissident friend,
Andrey SINYAVSKY (Abram Tertz), for the writings translated as This is
Moscow Speaking, and Other Stories (written before 1966; trans Stuart Hood
and others 1968 UK). The title story is of sf interest: 10 August 1960 is
declared to be Public Murder Day; the point is satirical. The eponymous
character in "The Man from MINAP" has the power of predetermining the sex
of any child from his loins. [JC]See also: TABOOS.

DANIELS, LOUIS G.
[s] Daniel F. GALOUYE.

DANIELS, MAX
Pseudonym of US writer Roberta Leah Jacobs Gellis (1927- ), who wrote
non-sf as Leah Jacobs. As MD she published two unremarkable sf adventures,
The Space Guardian (1978) and Offworld (1979). [JC]

DANN, JACK (MAYO)
(1945- ) US writer and anthologist, with a BA in social/political
science, who began publishing sf in 1970 with two stories for Worlds of If
with George ZEBROWSKI, "Dark, Dark the Dead Star" and "Traps". Among his
best and most revealing stories of this period was Junction (1973 Fantasy;
exp 1981), a NEBULA-award finalist in its early form; its young
protagonist must leave the eponymous village, the last place on Earth to
remain physically stable, to explore the "Hell" of mutability outside. The
expansion cogently dramatizes what Gregory FEELEY has suggested is JD's
central theme: the rousing of a young man from disaffected solipsism into
awareness of the marvels of the noosphere. Starhiker (fixup 1977), set in
a heightened SPACE-OPERA venue, similarly puts a young human singer-bard
escapee from alien-occupied Earth into an alien spaceship, where he
undergoes a series of revelatory experiences (including near
self-transcendence on a sentient planet) before returning to his depressed
home. The stories assembled in Timetipping (coll 1980) reiterate this
basic pattern. Only with THE MAN WHO MELTED (1984) did JD expand his
canvas by introducing a human subject - his lost wife - for whom the
protagonist must search through a baroque world rendered savagely mutable
through collective psychoses which have a binding effect on
reality.Despite the clear though strait attainments of his fiction, JD
soon became - and has remained - best known as an editor of several strong
anthologies: Wandering Stars (anth 1974) and More Wandering Stars (anth
1981) feature sf about Jews; Faster than Light (anth 1976), with George
Zebrowski; Future Power (anth 1976), with Gardner DOZOIS, the first of
many collaborations with Dozois (see listing below), Immortals: Short
Novels of the Transhuman Future (anth 1980); the impressive In the Field
of Fire (anth 1987) with Jeanne Van Buren Dann, about Vietnam. Much of his
effort in the 1980s was devoted to a long non-genre novel, with
MAGIC-REALIST elements, Counting Coup, which remained unpublished because
of the collapse of BLUEJAY BOOKS. Echoes of Thunder (1991 chap dos) with
Jack C. HALDEMAN II - a TOR BOOKS Double originally designed for DOS
publication, but ultimately released in the format of a conventional
two-item anthology - was much expanded as High Steel (1993), a virtuoso
NEAR FUTURE tale which begins with its American Indian protagonist's
experiences as a shanghaied worker constructing a space station, but soon
expands in various directions, as the hero evolves into a SUPERMAN,
apocalyptic hallucinations afflict Earth's normals, and an enigmatic
message left by ALIENS promises the secret of FTL travel. But with the
exception of this remarkable exercise, it seems that, after climaxing his
genre career with the creation of a rich and humanized world in THE MAN
WHO MELTED, JD has lost his need to write sf. [JC]Other works: JD also
collaborated with Gardner Dozois on seven of the stories assembled in the
latter's Slow Dancing through Time (coll 1990).Other works as editor: An
exclamatory series, all with Dozois: Aliens! (anth 1980), Unicorns! (anth
1982), Magicats! (anth 1984), Bestiary! (anth 1985), Mermaids! (anth
1985), Sorcerers! (anth 1986), Demons! (anth 1987), Dogtales! (anth 1988),
Seaserpents! (anth 1989), Magicats II (anth 1991),Little People! (anth
1991), Invaders! (anth 1993) and Horses! (anth 1994).About the author: The
Work of Jack Dann: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (1990) by Jeffrey M.
ELLIOT.See also: ESP; GENERATION STARSHIPS; PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION; WAR.

DANTE, JOE
(1947- ) US film-maker. Originally a fan writer, JD entered the film
industry working for Roger CORMAN's New World in the trailers department,
making Filipino movies look more exciting by inserting stock shots of
exploding helicopters. His first feature, codirected with Allan Arkush,
was Hollywood Boulevard (1976), a brisk and breezy SATIRE on low-budget
schlock movies featuring many cameo roles, ranging from Dick Miller to
Godzilla ( GOJIRA), inaugurating JD's tradition of movie-buff
in-jokes.With writer John SAYLES, JD made PIRANHA (1978) and The Howling
(1981), a pair of effective MONSTER MOVIES with amusing satirical twists
(the latter not really sf), and then he gravitated into the orbit of
Steven SPIELBERG to direct an episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie (adapted
from "It's a Good Life" [1953] by Jerome BIXBY) and more famously Gremlins
(1984), a nasty anecdote in which anarchic monsters chew away at the
foundations of a Spielberg-cum-Capra small town.Following the box-office
disappointment of his most personal film, EXPLORERS (1985), a meditation
on the SENSE OF WONDER informed by the cultural legacy of Forrest J.
ACKERMAN, JD has had less independent control, but has nevertheless
delivered a lively, self-aware run of comedies with an edge: INNERSPACE
(1987) is a feature-length parody of FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), The 'burbs
(1989) a psychotic neighbourhood comedy, and Gremlins II: The New Batch
(1990). JD has also contributed episodes to the omnibus film of sf skits,
Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), and to the tv series AMAZING STORIES
(1985-7), The TWILIGHT ZONE (2nd series, 1985-7) and Police Squad (1982).
In 1991 JD became creative consultant for, and directed 5 episodes of,
Eerie, Indiana (1991), an NBC tv series about a Tom-Sawyer-type kid and
his sidekick who conduct supernatural investigations in a seemingly
average but actually weird town. ]JD's next feature was the amusing
MATINEE (1993), a coming-of-age film set in Key West, 1962, during the
Cuban missile crisis, in which much of the action is connected to a new sf
exploitation movie premiering in town, "Mant", about a man who becomes a
giant ant creature. Matinee is a kind of critique of early 1960s MONSTER
MOVIES and their cultural background. [KN/PN]See also: CINEMA; FEMINISM;
HORROR IN SF.

DANTE ALIGHIERI
(1265-1321) Italian poet. His La divina commedia (c1304-21 in manuscript;
many translations as The Divine Comedy) is an epic poem of 100 cantos in 3
books, each of 33 cantos, with an introduction; the books are Inferno,
Purgatorio and Paradiso. It has profoundly affected not only the religious
imagination but all subsequent allegorical creation of imaginary worlds in
literature generally. For that reason it can (with hindsight) be said to
be a work of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION (although it stands at the head of
other traditions much older than the sciencefictional); indeed, it is sf
in the strict sense, albeit the science is medieval. Its subject is
cosmological ( COSMOLOGY) - it offers us in its worlds of Hell, Purgatory
and Heaven (and Earth, Sun and stars) a picture of the way the Universe is
structured. The obvious objection to such a view is that the work is
theological and philosophical in intent; this is so, but there was no
distinction between science and RELIGION when Dante wrote, and he did so
with the eye of a scientist, transcending the rational but not deserting
it. The tradition that led to sf has The Divine Comedy as an ancestor.
[PN]See also: GODS AND DEMONS; ITALY; MUSIC.

DANVERS, JACK
Writing name of Camille Auguste Marie Caseleyr (1909- ), a Belgian who,
after WWII, emigrated to Australia, where he set his sf novel, The End of
it All (1962 UK). The tale depicts a nuclear WAR and climaxes in doomed
Australian attempts to cope with epidemics unleashed by the opposing
forces. In the end extinction is total. [JC]

DANZELL, GEORGE
[s] Nelson S. BOND.

DARE, ALAN
George GOODCHILD.

D'ARGENTEUIL, PAUL
Pseudonym of unidentified US author of The Trembling of Borealis (1899),
set in the USA after a war with Cuba and featuring a revolt of the working
classes which brings about a welfare state and the disenfranchisement of
Blacks. Given the socialist - albeit racist - bent of the tale, the
author's pseudonym can be read as linking wealth to work. [JC]

d'ARGYRE, GILLES
Gerard KLEIN.

DARIU, AL. N.
[r] ROMANIA.

DARK ANGEL
I COME IN PEACE.

DARKE, JAMES
Laurence JAMES.

DARKMAN
Film (1990). Universal. Dir Sam Raimi, starring Liam Neeson, Frances
McDormand, Colin Friels, Larry Drake. Screenplay Chuck Pfarrer, Sam Raimi,
Ivan Raimi, Daniel Goldin, Joshua Goldin, from a story by Raimi. 91 mins.
Colour.In its violence and simple, over-the-top characterization this is
essentially the film equivalent of a comic-book, an "origin of a
SUPERHERO" story of sadism and revenge. Darkman, patterned on the Phantom
of the Opera (with visual quotes reminding us of other early Universal
HORROR films), has had his face and hands horribly mutilated in a gangster
attack, and the nerves that transmit pain and pleasure have been severed
in hospital. He returns as a half-mad avenger. The sf element - synthetic
skin that lasts exactly 99 mins and permits Darkman to duplicate exactly
his gangster enemies or appear as briefly normal to his girlfriend - is
borrowed from the old sf movie DOCTOR X (1932). There are bravura opening
and closing sequences, but D is badly constructed (too many writers?) and
uninvolving, lacking the insane vigour of Raimi's debut film, The Evil
Dead (1982). [PN]

DARK STAR
Film (1974). Jack H. Harris Enterprises. Dir John CARPENTER, starring
Brian Narelle, Dan O'Bannon, Joe Saunders, Dre Pahich. Screenplay
Carpenter, O'Bannon. 83 mins. Colour.This cult success, Carpenter's debut,
was originally a 45min film shot on 16mm by students at the University of
Southern California for $6000, but producer Jack H. Harris provided cash
for new footage and for transfer to 35mm film stock. DS is a SATIRE on
space films: the Dark Star is a SPACESHIP in which four men are endlessly
roaming the Universe on a tedious mission to locate "unstable" worlds and
destroy them with thermostellar bombs. Conditions have deteriorated - the
COMPUTER is malfunctioning, the life-support systems acting up, the crew
in various stages of psychosis, the cryonically maintained captain "dead"
but still partly conscious, the ship's mascot (an ALIEN like a beach ball
with claws) increasingly belligerent and, worst of all, one of the
sentient thermostellar bombs has to be continually coaxed out of exploding
prematurely by debates about phenomenology. DS ends apocalyptically ("Let
there be light!" the bomb decides), with each crew member reaching his
desired apotheosis, one board-riding through space and a second undergoing
ecstatic union with the stars in an asteroid shower.Described by one
critic as "a Waiting for Godot in outer space", DS is a sophisticated
mixture of black comedy and genuine sf. Technically quite good, its sets
and effects are superior to those of sf films costing 10 times its
(eventual) $60,000 budget. The novelization is Dark Star * (1974) by Alan
Dean FOSTER. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; SATIRE.

DARLTON, CLARK
Pseudonym of German writer, translator and editor Walter Ernsting (1920-
); he has also written as F. MacPatterson. In the 1950s he edited the
German Utopia-Magazin (launched 1955), providing it with much original and
translated material. In 1957 he began a series of sf publications,
Terra-Sonderband, and was one of the founding editors and writers, with K.
-H. SCHEER, of the PERRY RHODAN series of SPACE OPERAS from 1961. Over
1600 of these booklets had appeared, on a weekly basis, by mid-1992; a
slightly expurgated series of English-language translations began with
Enterprise Stardust (trans 1969 US) and continued through 141 further
instalments to Phantom Horde (trans 1979 US). [JC/PN]See also: GERMANY.

DARNAY, ARSEN (JULIUS)
(1936- ) Hungarian-born writer, in the USA from 1953 and a US citizen
from 1961. His first sf story, "Such is Fate", appeared in If in 1974; his
first novel, A Hostage for Hinterland (1976), set the pattern for much of
his work: in a post- HOLOCAUST USA, where floating CITIES depend upon
land-dwelling ecofreak tribesmen for the helium that cools their reactors,
crisis erupts into a bleak and somewhat metaphysical confrontation, at the
end of which the cities die. A similarly abstract dichotomy, set on a
RIMWORLD, is destabilized in The Siege of Faltara (1978). The Splendid
Freedom (coll of linked stories 1980) carries its protagonists, who are
linked through REINCARNATION, into a variety of DYSTOPIAS. AD has not
published fiction since 1981. [JC]Other works: Karma: A Novel of
Retribution and Transcendence (1978; vt The Karma Affair 1979); The
Purgatory Zone (1981).

DARRINGTON, HUGH
(1940- ) UK writer whose sf novels are The God Killers (1970) with Tony
Halliwell, both authors signing as James Ross, and Gravitor (1971), which
features an oppressed world and a scientific plot to increase GRAVITY,
causing chaos . . . to the advantage of the plotters. [JC]

DARWIN, ERASMUS
(1731-1802) UK physician, philosopher and poet; grandfather of Charles
Darwin (1809-1882). It is for his poetry that ED is of interest to the sf
field; in particular, The Botanic Garden: A Poem, in Two Parts; Part 1:
The Economy of Vegetation; Part II: The Loves of the Plants (as separate
poems 1792 and 1789; 1795) conveys through its wooden but occasionally
powerful couplets a serious speculative message about the chronological
depth of EVOLUTION, for which he argued in abominable rhyme - examples of
his verse can be found in The Stuffed Owl (anth 1930), ed D.B. Wyndham
Lewis (1894-1969) and Charles Lee - clearly presaging the revolutionary
thoughts of his grandson.ED's prose work Zoonomia: Of the Laws of Organic
Life (1796) and the posthumously published poem The Temple of Nature
(1802) both extend the argument, with a wealth of technological and
scientific imagery. The extent to which science fired ED's imagination,
together with his contemporary popularity, make him an important figure in
PROTO SCIENCE FICTION and his work an early outstanding success in terms
of sf PREDICTION. He belonged to the period when the imagery of science
first entered the consciousness of laymen in general. [JC/PN]About the
author: Erasmus Darwin (1963) by Desmond King-Hele; Brian W. ALDISS
discusses ED at length in Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science
Fiction (1986) with David WINGROVE.

D.A.R.Y.L.
Film (1985). World Film Services/Columbia. Dir Simon Wincer, starring
Mary Beth Hurt, Michael McKean, Kathryn Walker, Josef Sommer, Barret
Oliver. Screenplay David Ambrose, Allan Scott, Jeffrey Ellis. 100 mins.
Colour.D.A.R.Y.L. is a Data Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform but, when "he"
(Oliver) wakes up amnesiac in the woods, he thinks he is just a small boy,
Daryl. Adopted by a pleasant family, he learns not to show his
superintelligence and coordination too obviously and makes local friends,
but then is located by the scientists who made him, almost terminated by
the military, escapes . . . and so forth. There is a happy ending. This
film is fairly obviously aimed at children and is competently and even
engagingly made, but it never ignites; even those sf riffs proven
successful by Steven SPIELBERG and here borrowed from him (most obviously
- E.T. - the alien being sheltered in suburbia who undergoes death and
resurrection) remain comparatively inert. [PN]

DATLOW, ELLEN (SUE)
(1949- ) US editor, fiction editor of Omni from Oct 1981, and editor of
two sequences of spin-off anthologies from that magazine 1983-9 ( OMNI for
details); Omni Visions One (anth 1993) and Omni Visions Two (anth 1994),
on the other hand, contain mostly original stories. The combination of a
decent budget and good critical taste have made ED one of the more
influential US sf (and fantasy) editors, and she has by no means
restricted her story-buying to work from already established writers.
Aside from the Omni anthologies she has edited Blood is Not Enough: 17
Stories of Vampirism (anth 1989)Alien Sex (anth 1990), a strong collection
of both sf and fantasy ( SEX); A Whisper of Blood (anth 1991) and Little
Deaths: 24 Tales of Sex and Horror (anth 1994 UK; cut 1995 US). With Terri
WINDLING ED has edited the Year's Best Fantasy anthology series: The
Year's Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (anth 1988; vt Demons and
Dreams: The Best Fantasy and Horror 1 UK), The Year's Best Fantasy: Second
Annual Collection (anth 1989; vt Demons and Dreams 2 UK), #3 (anth 1990),
#4 (anth 1991),#5 (1992), #6 (anth 1993) and #7 (anth 1994). These are
certainly the best of their kind - the first two won World Fantasy AWARDS
- being very big, very wide-ranging and intelligently selected; ED mainly
looks after the horror, Windling the fantasy. This division of
responsibilities is less apparent in Snow White, Blood Red (anth 1993) and
Black Thorn, White Rose (anth 1994), two linked anthologies comprising
original stories, all twice-told re-visions of traditional folk material.
[PN]

DAUDET, LEON
[r] FRANCE.

DAUGHTER OF DESTINY
ALRAUNE.

DAVENPORT, BASIL
(1905-1966) US academic and anthologist. His connection with sf began
with An Introduction to Islandia, its History, Custom, Laws, Language, and
Geography, as Prepared by Basil Davenport from Islandia (1942 chap), a
book about Islandia (1942) by Austin Tappan WRIGHT. Then came a short
critical and historical study, Inquiry into Science Fiction (1955chap). BD
also introduced the anonymously edited critical anthology The Science
Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (anth 1959; rev 1964),
which contains lectures delivered by Alfred BESTER, Robert BLOCH, Robert
A. HEINLEIN and C.M. KORNBLUTH at a 1957 symposium at the University of
Chicago. His anthologies are in the main fantasy rather than sf. Three
were compiled with the aid of Albert Paul Blaustein (Allen DE GRAEFF),
uncredited: Deals with the Devil (anth 1958; cut vt Twelve Stories from
Deals with the Devil: An Anthology 1959), Invisible Men (anth 1960) and
Famous Monster Tales (anth 1967). His other anthologies are Ghostly Tales
to be Told (anth 1950), Tales to be Told in the Dark (anth 1953; cut vt
Horror Stories from Tales to be Told in the Dark 1960) and 13 Ways to
Dispose of a Body (anth 1966). [PN]See also: SF IN THE CLASSROOM.

DAVENPORT, BENJAMIN RUSH
(? -? ) US writer whose best-known novel is the future- WAR tale
Anglo-Saxons, Onward! A Romance of the Future (1898), in which, led by the
US president, Anglo-Saxons dominate the world, including Spain - cf the
contemporaneous Spanish-US War. [JC]Other works: "Uncle Sam's" Cabins: A
Story of American Life, Looking Forward a Century (1895); Blood Will Tell:
The Strange Story of a Son of Ham (1902).

DAVENPORT, GUY (MATTISON)
(1927- ) US academic, translator and short-story writer, long a teacher
at the University of Kentucky, known for his translations from the Greek,
his poetry, his literary essays - collected primarily in The Geography of
the Imagination (coll 1981) and Every Force Evolves a Form (coll 1987) -
and for the FABULATIONS assembled in Tatlin! (coll 1974), Da Vinci's
Bicycle (coll 1979), Trois Caprices (coll 1981 chap), Eclogues (coll
1981), The Bowmen of Shu (1983 chap), which also appears in Apples and
Pears (coll 1984), The Bicycle Rider (1985 chap), which also appears in
The Jules Verne Steam Balloon (coll 1987) and The Drummer of the Eleventh
North Devonshire Fusiliers (coll 1990). Although J.G. BALLARD and others
had insinuated a fascination with French Surrealism into their NEW-WAVE
tales, GD's own collaged and hallucinated conflations of data and visuals
and Sehnsucht - as in "Tatlin!" (1974), the novel-length "The Dawn in
Erewhon" (1974), "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier" (1975), "The Richard
Nixon Freischutz Rag" (1976) and "Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta"
(1980) - mediate neatly between the solitary despair of the 1960s work of
Ballard and others and the more broadly socialized and nostalgic vision of
sf writers like Howard WALDROP. Indeed GD's work can be seen as an
important adumbration of the sudden late 1980s growth in alternate-history
tales ( ALTERNATE WORLDS) which plunder the earlier 20th century for icons
and protagonists and for moments of haunting significance. [JC]

DAVENTRY, LEONARD (JOHN)
(1915- ) UK writer whose first sf novel, A Man of Double Deed (1965),
began the Claus Coman series of tales set on an Earth partly recovered
from nuclear DISASTER and run by telepaths, one of whom, the protagonist,
is assigned the task of solving various problems. The sequel is
Reflections in a Mirage, and The Ticking is in Your Head (coll 1969 US),
two book-length stories, published separately as Reflections in a Mirage
(1969) and The Ticking is in Your Head (1970). Terminus (1971) is a grim
DYSTOPIA. [JC]Other works: Twenty-One Billionth Paradox (1971 US); Degree
XII (1972); You Must Remember Us - ? (1980).

DAVEY, (HENRY) NORMAN
(1888-? ) UK writer whose Yesterday: A Tory Fairy-Tale (1924) describes
the NEAR-FUTURE secession of the Isle of Wight. Although proof copies of
the novel exist entitled Perhaps and dated 1914, there is no evidence of
the text having actually been published then. ND's other genre works are
fantasies; they include the Matthew Sumner books: The Pilgrim of a Smile
(1921) and The Penultimate Adventure (1924 chap) - both assembled as The
Pilgrim of a Smile (omni 1933) - Judgment Day (1928) and Pagan Parable: an
Allegory in Four Acts (1936). [JC]

DAVID, PETER (ALLEN)
(1956- ) US writer, many of whose books are signed David Peters. As PD he
has concentrated on fantasies like Knight Life (1987), a tale in which
Arthur is put into the modern world, and Howling Mad: A Tale of Relenting
Horror (1989); on film ties like The Return of Swamp Thing * (1989),The
Rocketeer * (1991) and Alien Nation: Body and Soul * (1993), tied to a
cancelled tv series; and on Star Trek ties, STAR TREK novels includingThe
Rift * (1991), The Disinherited * (1992) with Michael Jan FRIEDMAN and
Robert Greenberger, and Who Killed Captain Kirk? * (graph 1993) illus Tom
Sutton and Gordon Purcell; several STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION tales:
Strike Zone * (1989), A Rock and a Hard Place * (1990), Vendetta * (1991),
Q-in-Law * (1991), Imzadi * (1992), Starfleet Academy: Whorf's First
Adventure * (1993), Starfleet Academy: Line of Fire * (1993), Starfleet
Academy: Survival *(1993) and Q-Squared * (1994).As David Peters, he is
responsible for two sequences: the Photon game-tie series - Photon: For
the Glory * (1987), #2: High Stakes * (1987), #3: In Search of Mom *
(1987), #4: This is Your Life, Bhodi Li * (1987), #5: Exile * (1987) and
#6: Skin Deep * (1988) - and the Psi-Man series - Psi-Man (1990), Psi-Man:
Deathscape (1991), #3: Main Street D.O.A. (1991), #4: The Chaos Kid
(1991), #5: Stalker (1991) and #6: Haven (1991). [JC]

DAVIDSON, AVRAM (JAMES)
(1923-1993) US writer and editor, born in Yonkers, New York; he served in
the US Navy 1941-5 and with the Israeli forces in the 1948-9 Arab-Israeli
War. An orthodox Jew, though his faith found direct expression very rarely
in his stories, he began publishing sf with "My Boy Friend's Name is
Jello" (1954) in FSF, and early established a reputation for a sometimes
obtrusive literacy and considerable wit. "Or All the Seas with Oysters"
(1958) won a HUGO. Much of his early fiction appeared in FSF, which he
edited 1962-4 - it won a Hugo in 1963 - and producing as part of his job
The Best of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 12th Series (anth 1963), 13th
Series (anth 1964) and 14th Series (anth 1965). His first novel was Joyleg
(1962) with Ward MOORE (whom see for details).AD's first solo novel,
Mutiny in Space (1964), immediately established his credentials as a
writer of superior SPACE OPERA rather in contrast to the manner and style
of his short works. Other novels with a similarly straightforward effect
include Rork! (1965), The Enemy of My Enemy (1966) and, most notably,
Masters of the Maze (1965), an intricate PARALLEL-WORLDS adventure with
sharply characterized humans involved in barring interdimensional transit
to a remarkably vivid ALIEN race. The Kar-Chee Reign (1966 dos) and Rogue
Dragon (1965) share a relaxedly pan-Galactic FAR-FUTURE perspective on
their Earthly venue; Clash of Star-Kings (1966 dos), which along with
Rogue Dragon was nominated for a NEBULA, is set in a richly realized
Mexico which becomes a venue for a game of war amongst returning alien
"gods". But even these relatively active tales tend to subordinate plot to
the play of language and a visible affection for the phenomenal world,
characteristics increasingly found in his later fiction, where an air of
combined flamboyance and meditative calm enriches - but does not always
manage to enliven - ornate fantasies like The Phoenix and the Mirror, or
The Enigmatic Speculum (1966 AMZ; 1969), which opens the Vergil Magus
sequence in a medieval ALTERNATE WORLD whose universal scholastic
worldview, encompassing everything from geography to alchemy, turns out to
be literally accurate (AD has always been fascinated by PSEUDO-SCIENCE).
Vergil goes through a number of adventures in this ornately humanized
environment in search of a "virgin mirror" to trade for his stolen
virility, but the novel closes without coming to a satisfactory climax,
nor does Vergil in Averno (1987), published as a sequel but in fact set
prior to the earlier novel, bring things to a close. This tale, set in a
factory town inside a volcano, is a rich and wry parable of the birth of
the Renaissance mentality (with the magus himself rather jumping the gun).
The Peregrine series - Peregrine: Primus (1971) and Peregrine: Secundus
(1981) - even more relaxedly conveys its protagonist through a wide and
intriguing world reminiscent of Classical Rome. The Island Under the Earth
(1969) began a series not yet continued.AD's notable short fiction has
been assembled in several volumes: Or All the Seas with Oysters (coll
1962), What Strange Stars and Skies (coll 1965), Strange Seas and Shores
(coll 1971), The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy (coll of linked stories
1975; exp vt The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy 1990), set in an
ALTERNATE-WORLD, RURITANIAN version of late-19th-century Europe, and The
Redward Edward Papers (coll 1978), re-sorted in THE BEST OF AVRAM DAVIDSON
(coll 1979) ed Michael KURLAND, and Avram Davidson: Collected Fantasies
(coll 1982) ed John SILBERSACK. AD's wit and bookish allusiveness - he is
perhaps sf's most explicitly literary author - shine most persuasively in
his shorter works, where constraints in length seem to keep him from
floundering or self-indulgence and the narrative thread stays in view; the
focus supplied by length constraints also has a concentrating effect on
the disquisitory 1980s essays, published in IASFM and elsewhere, and
assembled as Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual
Foundations of Several Ancient Legends (coll 1993). Working in short
compass seems, too, to excite his extraordinary sense of humour. It is
hard to imagine the genre that could encompass him; it is even more
difficult to imagine fantasy or sf without him. [JC]Other works: And on
the Eighth Day (1964) and The Fourth Side of the Triangle (1965), both as
by Ellery Queen, both detections; Ursus of Ultima Thule (fixup 1973);
Polly Charms the Sleeping Woman (1975 FSF; 1977 chap), an Eszterhazy tale;
Magic for Sale (anth 1983); And Don't Forget the One Red Rose (1975
Playboy; 1986 chap); Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (1988) with Grania
(Eve) Davis (1943- ).See also: ATLANTIS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS;
FANTASY; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
FICTION ; PASTORAL.

DAVIDSON, HUGH
[s] Edmond HAMILTON.

DAVIDSON, JOHN
(1857-1909) UK poet, playwright and story-writer, best known in the first
capacity for Fleet Street Eclogues (coll 1893). Miss Armstrong's and Other
Circumstances (coll 1896) contains "An Interregnum in Fairyland", a
fantasy tale. "Eagle's Shadow", a future- WAR story, and "The Salvation of
Nature", a spoof tale ending in worldwide DISASTER, both feature in the
The Great Men cycle of CLUB-STORIES collected in The Great Men, and A
Practical Novelist (omni 1891), the second title not being of genre
interest; both these stories also appear in The Pilgrimage of Strongsoul
and Other Stories (coll 1896). A Full and True Account of the Wonderful
Mission of Earl Lavender (1895) is a SATIRE about a self-appointed
Nietzschean overman; and the Testaments series of poems - especially The
Testament of a Vivisector (1901) - also make use of Nietzsche. [JC/BS]See
also: END OF THE WORLD.

DAVIDSON, LIONEL
(1922- ) UK-born writer, resident in Israel, best known for his
thrillers, beginning with The Night of Wenceslas (1960). His second, The
Rose of Tibet (1962), has a lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) plot-line. The Sun
Chemist (1976) is borderline sf: the lost formula of Israeli scientist and
president Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) uses the sweet potato as a means of
tapping the Sun's power; there is an adventurous quest to find it. Under
Plum Lake (1980) is a fantasy for children with a trip to Paradise under
sea and in outer space. [PN]

DAVIDSON, MICHAEL
(?1944- ) US author of two sf novels: The Karma Machine (1975), a
dystopian vision of a COMPUTER-dominated world, and Daughter of Is: A
Science Fiction Epic: An "Else-when"Parable (1978), an ALTERNATE-WORLD
tale. [JC]

DAVIES, FREDRIC
Ron ELLIK.

DAVIES, HUGH SYKES
(1909-1984) UK writer and academic whose surrealist novel Petron (1935)
is, at least retroactively, of some value to sf writers and readers as an
early model for contemporary attempts at the rendering of INNER SPACE. The
Papers of Andrew Melmoth (1960) is an interesting story about the
EVOLUTION of INTELLIGENCE in rats, quite different, in its quiet literary
tone, from the Gothic treatment such subjects normally evoke. [JC/PN]

DAVIES, L(ESLIE) P(URNELL)
(1914- ) UK writer who has worked also as a pharmacist and as a painter;
he now lives in the Canary Isles. His consistently borderline sf often
permits a delusional-frame interpretation of the events it depicts, so
that frequently it is difficult to distinguish among the genres he
utilizes, which include horror, fantasy, suspense thriller and sf. Along
with John BLACKBURN and John LYMINGTON, both of whose writing his
sometimes resembles, LPD has in a sense founded a new generic amalgam:
tales whose slippage among various genres is in itself a characteristic
point of narrative interest, with the reader kept constantly in suspense
about the generic nature of any climaxes or explanations to be
presented.LPD began publishing sf with "The Wall of Time" for London
Mystery Magazine in 1960, and published fiction under a number of
pseudonyms, including Leo Barne, Robert Blake, Richard Bridgeman, Morgan
Evans, Ian Jefferson, Lawrence Peters, Thomas Phillips, G.K. Thomas,
Leslie Vardre and Rowland Welch.His first novel, The Paper Dolls (1964),
televised in 1968, sets a mystery involving telepathy and murder in the
depths of the English countryside, a venue he uses frequently. Man out of
Nowhere (1965; vt Who is Lewis Pinder? 1966 US) and The Artificial Man
(1965) can both be read as delusional-frame tales; the latter, about a
NEAR-FUTURE secret agent immured in a "fake" English village while his
unconscious is probed, was made into the film Project X (1968), not to be
confused with PROJECT X (1987). LPD's subsequent novels have been, as to
genre, variously marketed, but they share an ambivalence in the way they
can be read, an occasional glibness of effect, and narrative skill.
[JC]Other works: Psychogeist (1966); The Lampton Dreamers (1966); Tell it
to the Dead (1966 as by Leslie Vardre in UK; vt The Reluctant Medium 1967
US); Twilight Journey (1967); The Nameless Ones (1967 as by Leslie Vardre
in UK; vt A Grave Matter 1968 US); The Alien (1968; vt The Groundstar
Conspiracy 1972), filmed as The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972); Stranger to
Town (1969); Dimension A (1969); Genesis Two (1969); The White Room
(1969); The Shadow Before (1970); Give Me Back Myself (1971); What Did I
Do Tomorrow? (1972); Assignment Abacus (1975); Possession (1976); The Land
of Leys (1979 US).See also: PSYCHOLOGY.

DAVIES, PAUL (CHARLES WILLIAMS)
(1946- ) UK physicist (currently [1992] Professor of Mathematical Physics
at the University of Adelaide in Australia), science writer and sf author
whose scientific nonfiction is perhaps more distinguished than his sf. His
novel Fireball (1987) has ANTIMATTER pellets impacting Earth and creating
chaos; although their actual source is an ALIEN spacecraft, they are
interpreted by the USA as a Soviet weapon. The ideas are interesting, the
thriller elements routine. However, his academic science books, signed
P.C.W. Davies, and his popular science books, signed Paul Davies, are very
good. In the former category are Space and Time in the Modern Universe
(1977), The Forces of Nature (1979), The Search for Gravity Waves (1980)
and The Accidental Universe (1982), among others. In the latter category
are The Runaway Universe (1978; vt Stardoom 1979 UK), Other Worlds (1980),
The Edge of Infinity (1981), God and the New Physics (1983), The Matter
Myth (1991) with John GRIBBIN, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a
Rational World (1992), The Last Three Minutes: Latest Thinking About the
Ultimate Fate of the Universe (1994) and Are We Alone?: Philosophical
Implications of the discovery of Extraterrestrial Life (1995), among
others. The speculations tend more towards the theological in the later
works. The pungency of his theological/cosmological writings is confirmed
by the award to PD in 1995 of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion
worth over one million US dollars, a prize in its field comparable to the
Nobel. [PN]See also: COSMOLOGY; METAPHYSICS; PARALLEL WORLDS; SCIENTISTS.

DAVIES, PETE
(1959- ) UK writer whose first novel, The Last Election (1986), depicts
with singular ferocity a NEAR-FUTURE UK ruled by the Money Party and its
senile Nanny; OVERPOPULATION and the total loss of a manufacturing base
lead to the government's dissemination of a painkiller which causes
premature ageing in the poor. The final election, won by Nanny with the
aid of a powerful advertising agency, is soon over. In Dollarville (1989
US), refocusing his Swiftian rage on less local targets, PD constructs an
impressively surreal though unspecific venue, a world polluted beyond
redemption in which the rich are inconceivably corrupt; in this
environment, a decent-hearted advertising man attempts to save a woman
ecologist from a porno king; but the world ends. [JC]

DAVIES, WALTER C.
[s] C.M. KORNBLUTH.

DAVIES, W.X.
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author of the Countdown WWIII sequence
of military-sf adventures: Countdown WWIII: Operation North Africa (1984),
#2: Operation Black Sea (1984), #3: Operation Choke Point (1984) and #4:
Operation Persian Gulf (1984). [JC]

DAVIS, ELLIS JAMES
[r] ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS.

DAVIS, FREDERICK C(LYDE)
(1902-1977) US writer of pulp fiction, sometimes under pseudonyms. His
first book was The Smiling Killer (coll c1935 chap UK). His most
interesting early work was the Moon Man sequence, first published from
1933 in Ten Detective Aces; after the publication, decades later, of one
tale as The Moon Man (1974 chap), the sequence began to be released in
book form with The Night Nemesis: The Complete Adventures of the Moon Man,
Volume One (coll 1985) ed Gary Hoppenstand and Garyn G. Roberts; however,
no further volumes appeared. Under the house name Curtis STEELE, FCD was
responsible for the lead novels in the magazine OPERATOR # 5 from Apr 1934
to Nov 1935. 13 of these appeared in book form in 3 separate paperback
series: (a) Legions of the Death Master (1966), The Army of the Dead
(1966), The Invisible Empire (1966; vt Operator 5 #2: The Invisible Empire
1974), Master of Broken Men (1966), Hosts of the Flaming Death (1966),
Blood Reign of the Dictator (1966), March of the Flame Marauders (1966),
and Invasion of the Yellow Warlords (1966); (b) the original first 3
magazine novels republished in chronological order as The Masked Invasion
(1974), The Invisible Empire (see above) and The Yellow Scourge (1974);
(c) Cavern of the Damned (1980), Legions of Starvation (1980) and Scourge
of the Invisible Death (1980). [JC/PN]Other work: The Mole Men Want Your
Eyes (1976 chap).

DAVIS, GERRY
(1930-1991) UK writer, primarily for tv, who collaborated with Kit PEDLER
on three sf novels: Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eater * (1971), derived from
their DOOMWATCH tv series, Brainrack (1974) and The Dynostar Menace
(1975). GD also wrote children's novelizations tied to the DR WHO tv
series. [JC]See also: DISASTER; GENETIC ENGINEERING; POLLUTION.

DAVIS, GRANIA
[r] Avram DAVIDSON.

DAVIS AWARDS
AWARDS.

DAVIS PUBLICATIONS
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.

DAW BOOKS
New York publishing imprint started by Donald A. WOLLHEIM in 1972 (after
his departure from ACE BOOKS) with assistance from New American Library.
DB (the name derived from Wollheim's initials) publishes only sf and
FANTASY, producing 4-5 titles per month. The editorial policy is similar
to that followed by Wollheim at Ace: mostly adventure fiction, with a
sprinkling of serious works. There has been much series fiction,
particularly fantasy and SWORD AND SORCERY, by such authors as Alan Burt
Akers (Kenneth BULMER), Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, Lin CARTER, Michael
MOORCOCK, John NORMAN and E.C. TUBB, many of whom had followed Wollheim
from Ace Books. Major discoveries were C.J. CHERRYH and the fantasy writer
Tad Williams (1957- ), and DB also did much to promote the career of
Tanith LEE. An anthology series was Annual World's Best SF ( WOLLHEIM for
details). Wollheim's daughter Betsy Wollheim became president in 1985,
when her father was seriously ill; by the time of his death in 1990 the
number of books published annually by DB was rather lower than it had been
early in the 1980s. [PN/MJE]Further reading: Future and Fantastic Worlds:
A Bibliographic Retrospective of DAW Books (1972-1987) (dated 1987 but
1988) by Sheldon JAFFERY; An Index to DAW Books (1989 chap) by Ian Covell.

DAWN OF THE DEAD
(vt Zombie Italy; vt Zombies UK) Film (1978). Laurel. Dir George ROMERO,
starring David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reininger, Gaylen Ross.
Screenplay Romero, with Dario Argento (who also cowrote the music) as
script consultant. 127 mins, cut to 125 mins. Colour.The first of two
sequels to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) - the other was DAY OF THE DEAD
(1985) - this was (unusually) premiered in Italy, under the title Zombie.
DOTD is true sf, not just because of the pseudo-scientific explanation for
zombiism but because Romero is interested in zombies not only as occasions
for horror - though DOTD remains primarily a HORROR film - but also as
phenomena (their sociology, their possible intelligence) in the way that
an sf writer might be interested in ALIENS. Where the first film was
unremittingly black, this has a comic-strip and satirical humour about it,
as four survivors hole up in a shopping mall besieged by zombies and
bikers. Jokes about the death of capitalism, even while the capitalist
instinct survives, are focused on the many goods displayed in the spotless
temple of consumerism. The subtext (we, the working class, are, or could
be, the zombies) is spirited though unsubtle, and the film is remembered
by most for its violent, brilliantly choreographed action. [PN]See also:
SATIRE.

DAY, BRADFORD M(ARSHALL)
(1916- ) US sf collector and book-dealer whose bibliographical work is
one of the foundations on which modern sf scholarship has been built (
BIBLIOGRAPHIES). His The Complete Checklist of Science-Fiction Magazines
(1961 chap) defines sf widely and lists a number of hero-villain, fantasy
and foreign magazines. The Supplemental Checklist of Fantastic Literature
(1963) is a compilation of many titles omitted by or published after the
period covered by Everett F. BLEILER's The Checklist of Fantastic
Literature (1948), itself widely revised in 1978. Other works by BMD are
The Checklist of Fantastic Literature in Paperbound Books (1965),
Bibliography of Adventure: Mundy, Burroughs, Rohmer, Haggard (1964) and An
Index on the Weird and Fantastica in Magazines (1953), which indexes most
of the Frank A. MUNSEY pulps and many other general-fiction PULP
MAGAZINES. All the above were originally published in stencilled format by
BMD himself; several have been republished since. [PN]See also: ANONYMOUS
SF AUTHORS.

DAY, DONALD B(YRNE)
(1909-1978) Pioneer sf indexer, resident in Oregon. His Index to the
Science Fiction Magazines 1926-1950 (1952), since reissued, has become,
along with its successors compiled by other hands ( BIBLIOGRAPHIES), an
essential tool for sf research. [PN]

DAY, (GERALD WILLIAM) LANGSTON
(1894-? ) UK writer whose Magic Casements (coll 1951) assembles
mythological fantasies, and whose The Deep Blue Ice (1960) features the
experiences of a Victorian mountaineer who is frozen in ice for half a
century, and on revival ( SLEEPER AWAKES) must face the present day. [JC]

DAY, LIONEL
Ladbroke BLACK.

DAY AFTER, THE
Made-for-tv film (1983). ABC. Dir Nicholas Meyer, starring Jason Robards,
Jo-Beth Williams, Steven Guttenberg, John Lithgow, Lori Lethin, William
Allen Young and a dozen others. Screenplay Edward Hume. 121 mins.
Colour.Set in Lawrence, Kansas, the film tells of a massive nuclear
exchange between the USA and USSR. Many of the missiles hit Kansas and
Missouri, targeted because of their numerous Minuteman silos. TDA opens a
week before nuclear war begins, and ends around six weeks later. The film
instantly became a media event, and was hugely publicized and discussed.
It was widely - justly but irrelevantly - criticized, especially abroad,
for its soap-opera treatment. Meyer's purpose was to bring home a
propaganda message to ordinary people, which is precisely what soap-opera
characters are perceived to be by most viewers. The film, as the final
titles tell us, does give a remarkably mild account of the consequences of
atomic war, gruelling though it is. Nevertheless, it was an act of courage
for ABC to make this expensive film at all, since nuclear issues at that
time were barely touched on by US tv, being unattractive to advertisers,
and the nuclear debate was probably quite foreign to many viewers. Also,
TDA could hardly be seen as apolitical (despite disclaimers by ABC
executives): Meyer himself said "the movie tells you that civil defence is
useless", and observed that ABC gave him "millions of dollars to go on
prime-time tv and call Ronald Reagan a liar". Much of the film is routine
in treatment if not subject matter, but it contains several outstanding
sequences: the housewife who won't go into the cellar until she finishes
cleaning the house; the lecture to increasingly furious farmers about
implausible methods of "decontaminating soil"; a street packed with
radiation victims on makeshift mattresses as far as the eye can see.
[PN]See also: CINEMA.

DAY MARS INVADED EARTH, THE
Film (1962). API/20th Century-Fox. Dir Maury Dexter, starring Kent
Taylor, Marie Windsor, William Mims, Betty Beall. Screenplay Harry
Spalding. 70 mins. B/w.In this mediocre B-movie, Martians - who consist of
pure energy - travel to Earth via radio beam. As in INVASION OF THE BODY
SNATCHERS (1956), from which this clearly borrows, they duplicate human
beings, killing off the originals, to the horror of a scientist who
returns from vacation to find alien minds in the apparent bodies of
friends and family and human-shaped ashes in the swimming pool. Unusually,
the film ends with the Martians triumphant. [PN/JB]

DAY OF THE DEAD
Film (1985). Laurel. Dir George ROMERO, starring Lori Cardille, Terry
Alexander, Joseph Pilato, Richard Liberty, Howard Sherman. Screenplay
Romero. 101 mins, cut to 100 mins. Colour.Romero's plan, after showing the
initial zombie attacks ( NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD [1968]) and the total
breakdown of society ( DAWN OF THE DEAD [1978]), was to complete the
trilogy with a film showing a new coalition between humans and controlled
zombies. Partly for budgetary reasons, he settled for something less
ambitious. An underground military/storage base is used by a small company
of scientists and soldiers in their desperately rushed study of zombie
behaviour. Can they be controlled? What causes the infection? The
behaviour of both groups becomes increasingly psychotic, with one
scientist (Liberty) profaning the military dead by using their bodies to
reward zombies in a B.F. SKINNER-style attempt at conditioning, and the
senior military officer (Pilato) treating the scientists with insane
violence and contempt. One almost likeable zombie, well played by Sherman,
shows signs of human memory. Only three people, including the intelligent
woman scientist (Cardille) who is the point-of-view character, escape to
uncertain sanctuary in this small-scale, beautifully paced, claustrophobic
film. DOTD, copiously illustrated with scenes of dismemberment and
cannibalism, is sickening, but as ever Romero contrives to give metaphoric
resonance to his exploitation-movie images. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.

DAY OF THE DOLPHIN, THE
Film (1973). Avco-Embassy. Dir Mike Nichols, starring George C. Scott,
Trish Van Devere, Paul Sorvino, Fritz Weaver. Screenplay Buck Henry, based
on Un animal doue de raison (1967; trans as The Day of the Dolphin 1969)
by Robert MERLE. 105 mins. Colour.This above-average film, from a director
well known for social comedy but new to sf, concerns a marine biologist
who succeeds in teaching dolphins to speak English. The first half deals
seriously and convincingly with this historic contact between two
intelligent species, and conveys the genuine SENSE OF WONDER found in the
best sf, but the rest of the story concentrates less interestingly on an
attempt by a right-wing group to betray the innocent human-dolphin
relationship and use the dolphins to plant mines to assassinate the US
President. [JB]

DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, THE
1. Film (1963). Security Pictures/Allied Artists. Dir Steve Sekely
(uncredited), Freddie Francis, starring Howard Keel, Nicole Maurey,
Janette Scott, Kieron Moore. Screenplay Philip Yordan, based on The Day of
the Triffids (1951) by John WYNDHAM. 94 mins. Colour.This unsuccessful
version of a good novel had a moderately generous budget, but no sense
whatever of how sf works. Thus there is plenty of preaching, lots of
florid love interest, but only intermittent attention paid to the basic
situation, which, while silly, should have been interesting: most of
England's population blinded by light from a meteor shower, and a small
group, still sighted, trying to cope with attacks from lethal 7ft (2.1m)
mobile vegetables. The triffids are more absurd than frightening.2. UK tv
serial (1981). BBC. Dir Ken Hannam, adapted from Wyndham's novel by
Douglas Livingstone, starring John Duttine, Emma Relph. 6 30min episodes
(aired outside the UK as a 2-part miniseries). Colour. This was a low-key
but successful dramatization of the story, much better than the film.
[JB/PN]

DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE, THE
Film (1961). British Lion/Pax/Universal. Prod and dir Val Guest, starring
Edward Judd, Janet Munro, Leo McKern. Screenplay Wolf Mankowitz, Guest. 99
mins, cut to 90 mins (US). B/w.Val Guest, who had made The QUATERMASS
XPERIMENT (1956) and other sf/horror films for Hammer in the 1950s,
excelled himself with this intelligent DISASTER movie about the Earth
falling into the Sun after a reckless series of H-bomb tests have knocked
it out of orbit. Only more nuclear explosions, properly placed, can save
it. The film is made in a crisp, low-key, pseudo-documentary manner, with
much of the action set in the offices of the London Daily Express
newspaper (with former editor Arthur Christiansen playing himself). Les
Bowie's low-budget special effects are surprisingly good, including shots
of the Thames completely evaporating in the heat. The novelization is The
Day the Earth Caught Fire * (1961) by Barry Wells. [JB/PN]

DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE
Film (1951). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Robert WISE, starring Michael Rennie,
Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe. Screenplay Edmund H. North, based
on "Farewell to the Master" (1940) by Harry BATES. 92 mins. B/w.Produced
at the beginning of the sf boom of the 1950s, this is generally regarded
as a classic, though its ethics might be regarded as intemperate; it is,
however, directed with pace and impressive economy. An emissary from outer
space arrives by flying saucer in Washington, accompanied by an 8ft (2.4m)
ROBOT. The military gets very excited. The soft-spoken, human-seeming
ALIEN, Klaatu, has come to warn Earth that his people will not tolerate an
extension of human violence into space, but before he can deliver the
message he is wounded by a soldier, escapes, and takes a room in a
boarding house, where he learns about ordinary people. Later he arranges a
demonstration of his powers - the stopping of all electrical equipment,
all over the world. Then, his warning still undelivered, he is again shot,
this time fatally. But like Christ - the parallel seems deliberate - he
rises again and gives his message: unless human violence is curbed the
true masters, who are in fact the robots, will "reduce this Earth of yours
to a burnt-out cinder". Submission to the rule of implacable,
disinterested robots is an authoritarian proposal for a supposedly liberal
film. [PN/JB]

DAY THE FISH CAME OUT, THE
Film (1967). Michael Cacoyannis Productions/20th Century-Fox. Dir Michael
Cacoyannis, starring Tom Courtenay, Sam Wanamaker, Colin Blakely, Candice
Bergen, Ian Ogilvy. Screenplay Michael Cacoyannis. 109 mins. Colour.This
NEAR-FUTURE Greek/UK film takes off from a real-life incident in which the
US Air Force accidentally lost two H-bombs off the coast of Spain. A NATO
bomber crashes into the sea near a small Greek island, losing two H-bombs
and a "Doomsday weapon". To keep a low profile, the NATO recovery team
arrives disguised as holiday-makers, but this creates the impression that
the island is the "in" place to visit, and soon it is swarming with real
tourists. Then lethal viruses are released from a metal box found by a
fisherman. A strange mixture of slapstick and grim satire, TDTFCO is not
very coherent, but the final scenes, showing dead fish floating in the
black sea while all the tourists, already doomed themselves, dance with
frenzied abandon on the beach, are forceful. The novelization is The Day
the Fish Came Out * (1967) by Kay CICELLIS. [JB]

DAY THE WORLD ENDED, THE
Film (1956). Golden State/ARC. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN, starring
Richard Denning, Adele Jergens, Lori Nelson, Touch (Mike) Connors.
Screenplay Lou Rusoff. 81 mins, cut to 79 mins. B/w.The first sf/horror
film to be directed by Corman (although in 1954 he had produced Monster
from the Ocean Floor), this was, like most of his 1950s films, shot fast
(less than a week) on an amazingly small budget (c$40,000). TDTWE tells of
a small group of atomic-war survivors menaced by a MUTANT (created by the
radiation) with a bulbous head, three eyes and a taste for human flesh.
Corman later improved as a director. [JB/PN]

DC COMICS
US COMIC-book publishing company, based in New York, owing much of its
commercial success to its ownership of the copyrights in the SUPERHEROES
Batman, who is not quite an sf figure, and SUPERMAN, who is.In Feb 1935
Major Malcolm WHEELER-NICHOLSON published the first US comic book to
contain all-new material rather than reprints from newspaper comics
sections. His comic book, New Fun, ran for 5 issues Feb-Oct 1935, and was
reborn in 1936 as More Fun (June 1936-Dec 1947). By 1938 Nicholson was
publishing New Adventure Comics and Detective Comics; these were the first
comic books to feature regular characters in a series of adventures.
However, they didn't pay the bills, and Nicholson eventually settled his
debts by handing his company, National Comics, over to his printers, Harry
Donenfeld and Jack Leibowitz. Its next publication was Action Comics, #1
of which (June 1938) featured the first appearance of the character
Superman, created by Jerry SIEGEL and Joe Shuster. In May 1939 Detective
Comics #27 saw the debut of The Batman, drawn by Bob Kane and written by
Bill Finger. The future of the company was assured.Detective Comics was
the first all-new comic book of which each issue was devoted to a single
theme. This approach was an instant success, and so the company adopted
the initials DC as a trademark, featuring it boldly on (eventually) all of
its covers. It bought up Max Gaines's All American Comics in 1945.
Donenfeld pioneered the distribution of comic books in the USA, and his
efforts were backed up by those of National's stable of editors, writers
and artists, who included Alfred BESTER, Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER),
Gardner FOX, Edmond HAMILTON and Mort WEISINGER. These produced a flood of
memorable characters and series including Aquaman, Enemy Ace, The Flash,
Green Lantern, Hawkman, Sgt Rock, Sugar & Spike and WONDER WOMAN, and
Mystery in Space, Rex the Wonder Dog, Robin the Boy Wonder and Strange
Adventures.The 1950s saw a change of name to National Periodical
Publications and the introduction of romance titles (Girls Love), sf
(Strange Adventures), Westerns (Hopalong Cassidy) and licensed character
humour (Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason and Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis). In the
mid-1950s there was a resurgence in the popularity of superheroes, and
many characters abandoned in the previous decade were revived and
revamped. This popularity burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s, and such
material constituted a substantial proportion of the company's output,
even though there were new titles in the horror, gothic romance and
SWORD-AND-SORCERY genres. In 1968 the company was taken over by Warner
Bros., and in the early 1980s its official name finally became DC Comics
Inc.The 1980s saw a great expansion of new publishing formats, including
limited-series books, softcover and hardcover collections, and
GRAPHIC-NOVEL adaptations of the works of leading sf writers such as Larry
NIVEN and Robert SILVERBERG. A major contributing factor to the company's
recent success has been its exploitations of The Batman (now usually known
just as Batman), allowing artists and writers - including Frank MILLER,
and Alan MOORE and Brian BOLLAND - to evolve a number of highly individual
interpretations of his character and milieu. Batman's popularity has, of
course, benefited from the films Batman (1966), Batman (1989) and Batman
Returns (1992). [RT/SW]

DEAD KIDS
(vt Strange Behavior) Film (1981). Endeavour/Bannon Glenn/Hemdale. Dir
Michael Laughlin, starring Michael Murphy, Louise Fletcher, Dan Shor,
Fiona Lewis, Arthur Dignam. Screenplay Laughlin, William Condon. 99 mins,
cut to 93 mins. Colour.This Australian/New Zealand exploitation sf/ HORROR
movie is set in the US Midwest and has a largely US cast, but was actually
shot in New Zealand. It is the first of a projected trilogy (linked by
theme only) of which the second is STRANGE INVADERS (1983). At a research
centre teenage kids are acting as guinea pigs in experiments in
behavioural conditioning (the film is consciously anti-B.F. SKINNER) via a
drug injected into the brain - on one occasion, through the eyeball. Some
of them become homicidal and murder the children of a now-dead mad
SCIENTIST's old enemies. The mad scientist is revealed to be not dead
after all. The film - part of the teenage SPLATTER-MOVIE subgenre of the
time - has plenty of gore but also wit and intelligence, as well as a
rather 1950s style that would be featured again in Strange Invaders. [PN]

DEADLY INVENTION, THE
VYNALEZ ZKAZY.

DEADLY RAY FROM MARS, THE
FLASH GORDON.

DEAD ZONE, THE
Film (1983). Dino De Laurentiis/Lorimar. Dir David CRONENBERG, starring
Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Anthony
Zerbe, Martin Sheen. Screenplay Jeffrey Boam, based on The Dead Zone
(1979) by Stephen KING. 103 mins. Colour.Borderline-sf movie about John
Smith (Walken), who has an accident, spends five years in a coma, and
wakes to learn he has developed a PSI POWER, precognition. The "dead zone"
is a blank spot in his visions which may represent the possibility of the
future being changed. The more Smith uses his powers, which he is loath to
do because of the cargo of pain his visions often carry (and because they
age him), the more cut off he becomes from ordinary humanity. He performs
several minor miracles, solves an ugly murder mystery, and ultimately
prevents WWIII by thwarting the election of a smooth, narcissistic
politician (Sheen) who might otherwise, in the future, have plunged the
world into holocaust. Cronenberg's least typical and most commercial work,
perhaps because King's sprawling novel is a long way removed from the
personal material he normally uses, TDZ is nevertheless a good and
powerful film, notable for its sad, insistent images of winter,
correlating with Smith's retreat from life and also with the dead zone of
the title. Walken's performance in the main role is admirably lost and
icy. [PN]

DEAMER, (MARY ELIZABETH KATHLEEN) DULCIE
(1890-1972) New Zealand-born writer, in Australia from about 1922, where
in association with Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) and others she ruffled some
provincial dovecotes. Some of the content of In the Beginning: Six Studies
of the Stone Age and Other Stories (coll 1909) reappears in As It Was in
the Beginning (1929), an exercise in prehistoric sf set in Australia,
illus Lindsay. The Devil's Saint (1924 UK) is a historical novel with
greater elements of FANTASY than normal in her work. Holiday (1940) is a
fantasy of REINCARNATION. [JC]

DEAN, MAL
(1941-1974) UK illustrator who died young, of cancer. MD was well known
in the jazz world (he illustrated for Melody Maker) and in sf for the work
he did for NEW WORLDS in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it was especially
associated with the Jerry Cornelius stories by Michael MOORCOCK and
others. His work was mainly in black-and-white with a broad line and much
cross-hatching; it was strong, often deliberately unpolished, but the
reverse of artless. He favoured surreal juxtapositions, and often worked
in the grotesque satirical tradition of Hogarth. [PN]

DEAN, MARTYN
[r] Roger DEAN; Christopher EVANS.

DEAN, ROGER
(1944- ) UK illustrator. Primarily a commercial designer, especially of
record-album covers, RD has done some sf and fantasy ILLUSTRATION, and his
album and poster art shows a strong fantasy influence. His style is
strong, romantic and mannered; he contrasts very finely detailed figures
and machines against loosely structured backgrounds. His book Views (1975)
shows his development from a student at the Canterbury School of Art
onwards. Views was published by Dragon's Dream, a specialist publishing
house devoted primarily to UK fantasy illustrators, founded by RD and his
brother Martyn Dean; it also publishes under the Paper Tiger imprint. The
book Magnetic Storm (1984), ed Roger and Martyn Dean, details many of the
design and publishing projects - often fantastic or sciencefictional -
with which they have been associated. RD has been an important influence
on UK fantasy illustration, as has his brother, who is more closely
associated with book publishing than RD. [JG/PN]Other Works: The Flights
of Icarus (1987) with Donald Lehmkuhl

DEARMER, GEOFFREY
(1893- ) UK writer, and a WWI poet of some note. His Saint on Holiday
(1933) presents a NEAR-FUTURE UK in which the government is dominated by
ministries designed to be of benefit to citizens; it was couched as a
topsy-turvydom SATIRE. In They Chose to be Birds (1935) a preacher of
closed mind is unsettlingly duped into "becoming" a bird, and as such
learns some Wellsian lessons about the true nature of the world. [JC]Other
works: Three Short Plays (coll 1928), two of which are fantasies.

DEATH LINE
(vt Raw Meat US) Film (1972). K-L Productions. Dir Gary Sherman, starring
Donald Pleasence, Hugh Armstrong, Norman Rossington, David Ladd, Sharon
Gurney. Screenplay Ceri Jones, from a story by Sherman. 87 mins. Colour.In
the late 19th century a group of construction workers building an
extension to London's underground railway system are buried in a cave-in.
In the present, late-night travellers at Russell Square tube station are
being murdered (and eaten) by, we slowly learn, troglodytic descendants of
the entombed workers who have found their way up, and are now
supplementing their diet of rats with human meat. What raises this
exploitation movie out of the ordinary is its unexpected shift of
perspective - the dawning sympathy we are made to feel for the troglodytes
(nearly all of whom have died of a leprosy-like disease): they have almost
lost the use of language, but are still able to feel grief and love.
[PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES.

DEATH OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK
The INCREDIBLE HULK .

DEATH RACE 2000
Film (1975). New World. Prod Roger CORMAN. Dir Paul Bartel, starring
David Carradine, Simone Griffith, Louisa Moritz, Sylvester Stallone, Mary
Woronov. Screenplay Robert Thom, Charles Griffith, based on a story by Ib
Melchior. 80 mins. Colour.In this low-budget black SATIRE about a car race
across the USA in the year 2000, the winner is the driver who kills the
most pedestrians. "Frankenstein" (Carradine) - who has supposedly been in
so many crashes that most of his body has been replaced with artificial
parts - is the nation's favourite driver, and surprises everyone at the
end by running over the US President as a political gesture. The film's
fast pace and lively ironies led many critics to judge it superior to
ROLLERBALL (1975), a much more expensive production about the use of
brutal sports as an opiate for the masses. A cult classic, DR2000 has been
much imitated. [JB/PN]

DEATH RAYS
Rays that could kill, whether by heat or by disintegration, were the
staple WEAPONS of pulp sf in the 1920s and 1930s and became a central item
of sf TERMINOLOGY. At about the time death rays became old-fashioned in
sf, scientists in the real world saw fit to invent the laser, thus
retroactively justifying one of sf's fantasies. The death ray always,
however, had a basis in historical fact. After the well publicized
discoveries of X-rays by Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen (1845-1923) in 1895 and
of radioactive emissions by Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) - he too
called them rays - in 1896, the word "ray" entered the popular
imagination. One of the earliest literary examples is the "heat ray" used
by the Martians in H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898). [PN]

DEATHSPORT
Roger CORMAN.

DEATH WATCH
Le MORT EN DIRECT .

de BERGERAC, CYRANO
CYRANO DE BERGERAC.

De CAMP, CATHERINE A. CROOK
[r] L. Sprague DE CAMP.

De CAMP, L(YON) SPRAGUE
(1907- ) US writer, married from 1939 to Catherine A(delaide) Crook
(1907- ), who has collaborated on a number of his books, sometimes without
printed credit, although always freely acknowledged by LSDC; the two are
increasingly seen to have been a creative team for many years (she is
referred to below as CACDC). LSDC was educated at the California Institute
of Technology, where he studied aeronautical engineering, and at Stevens
Institute of Technology, where he gained a master's degree in 1933. He
went to work for a company dealing with patenting, and his first published
work was a cowritten textbook on the subject. He then met P. Schuyler
MILLER, with whom he collaborated on a novel, Genus Homo (1941 Super
Science Stories; 1950), which failed to find a publisher for several
years. His first published story was "The Isolinguals" (1937) in ASF; this
was before the arrival of John W. CAMPBELL Jr as editor, but when that
happened the two men proved highly compatible, and LSDC soon became a
central figure of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF, writing prolifically for ASF over
the next few years (on one occasion using the pseudonym Lyman R. Lyon),
his contributions including the Johnny Black series about an intelligent
bear: "The Command" (1938), "The Incorrigible" (1939), "The Emancipated"
(1940) and "The Exalted" (1940). Some of the better stories from this
period were collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp (coll 1978).It
was, however, the appearance in 1939 of ASF's fantasy companion UNKNOWN
which stimulated his most notable early work, including LEST DARKNESS FALL
(1939 Unknown; 1941; rev 1949), in which an involuntary time-traveller to
6th-century Rome attempts to prevent the onset of the Dark Ages; this was
the most accomplished early excursion into HISTORY in magazine sf, and is
regarded as a classic. Other contributions to Unknown included "None but
Lucifer" (1939) with H.L. GOLD, Solomon's Stone (1942 Unknown; 1956) and
the long title stories of Divide and Rule (coll 1948) - the title story
alone being republished as Divide and Rule (1939 ASF; 1990 chap dos) - The
Wheels of If (coll 1948), an ALTERNATE-WORLDS story, also cited below in
reissued form, and The Undesired Princess (coll 1951), the title story
alone being republished in The Undesired Princess and The Enchanted Bunny
(anth 1990), the second story being by David A. DRAKE. LSDC was most
successful in his collaborations with Fletcher PRATT, whom he met in 1939.
Pratt conceived the idea behind their successful Incomplete Enchanter
series of humorous fantasies in which the protagonist, Harold Shea, is
transported into a series of ALTERNATE WORLDS based on various myths and
legends. As usual with LSDC, the publication sequence is complex. The main
titles are: The Incomplete Enchanter (1940 Unknown; 1941; vt The
Incompleat Enchanter 1979 UK), The Castle of Iron (1941 Unknown; 1950) and
The Wall of Serpents (fixup 1960; vt The Enchanter Compleated 1980 UK).
The first two titles were then assembled as The Compleat Enchanter: The
Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea (omni 1975), and all three were
eventually put together as The Intrepid Enchanter (omni 1988 UK; vt The
Complete Compleat Enchanter 1989 US); Sir Harold and the Gnome King (1991
chap) was subsequently added to the Enchanter canon. Other collaborations
with Pratt were The Land of Unreason (1942) and The Carnelian Cube (1948),
the latter being published several years after it was written. In 1950,
LSDC and Pratt (whom see for details) began their Gavagan's Bar series of
CLUB STORIES, assembled in Tales From Gavagan's Bar (coll 1953; exp 1978).
LSDC joined the US Naval Reserve in 1942, spending the war working in the
Philadelphia Naval Yard alongside Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN.
Afterwards he published a few articles, but hardly any new fiction until
"The Animal Cracker Plot" (1949) introduced his Viagens Interplanetarias
stories, a loosely linked series set in a future where Brazil has become
the dominant world power, the stories themselves being sited mainly on
three worlds which circle the star Tau Ceti and are named after the Hindu
gods Vishnu, Ganesha and Krishna; the planet Krishna was a romantically
barbarian world on which LSDC could set, as sf, the kind of PLANETARY
ROMANCES he had previously written as fantasy, the market for pure fantasy
having disappeared with Unknown in 1943. Other planets circling other
stars included Osiris, Isis and Thoth. Many of the short stories in the
series were included in The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the
Viagens (coll 1953); others appeared in Sprague de Camp's New Anthology of
Science Fiction (coll 1953 UK), and "The Virgin of Zesh" (1953) was
assembled together with The Wheels of If (1940 Unknown; 1990 chap dos) in
The Virgin and the Wheels (coll 1976). Rogue Queen (1951), a novel in the
series, depicts a matriarchal humanoid society based on a hive structure;
it is, with LEST DARKNESS FALL, LSDC's most highly regarded sf work. The
remaining novels, an internal series all set on Krishna, were Cosmic
Manhunt (1949 ASF as "The Queen of Zamba"; 1954 dos; vt A Planet Called
Krishna 1966 UK; with restored text and with "Perpetual Motion" added, rev
vt as coll The Queen of Zamba 1977 US); The Search for Zei (1950 ASF as
the first half of "The Hand of Zei"; 1962; vt The Floating Continent 1966
UK) and The Hand of Zei (1950 ASF as the second half of "The Hand of Zei";
1963; cut 1963), both titles finally being superseded by publication of
the full original novel, The Hand of Zei (1950 ASF; 1982); The Tower of
Zanid (1958 Science Fiction Stories; cut 1958; with "The Virgin of Zesh"
added, vt as coll The Virgin of Zesh/The Tower of Zanid 1983); The Hostage
of Zir (1977); The Bones of Zora (1983) with CACDC; and The Swords of
Zinjaban (1991) with CACDC. They contain a blend of intelligent, exotic
adventure and wry humour characteristic of LSDC's better work, though they
do not explore any too deeply either the romantic or the human-condition
ironies available to aspiring authors of the planetary romance.LSDC was in
any case not to write much more sf, his later career increasingly being
devoted to outright fantasy and to SWORD AND SORCERY. He had gained an
interest in the latter category through reading Robert E. HOWARD's Conan
stories, and worked extensively on editing and adding to that series.
Tales of Conan (coll 1955; vt The Flame Knife 1981) consists of unfinished
Howard manuscripts converted into Conan stories and completed by LSDC (for
remaining titles, see listing below). His nonfiction writings on the
sword-and-sorcery genre have been published as The Conan Reader (coll
1968), Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976) and Blond Barbarians and
Noble Savages (1975 chap). He also edited the anthologies Swords and
Sorcery (anth 1963), The Spell of Seven (anth 1965), The Fantastic
Swordsmen (anth 1967) and Warlocks and Warriors (anth 1970), and co-edited
the critical anthologies The Conan Swordbook (anth 1969) and The Conan
Grimoire (anth 1972), both with George H. SCITHERS. LSDC's own first
sword-and-sorcery effort was the Pusadian sequence of tales assembled as
The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales (coll 1953); the title novel
was later published alone as The Tritonian Ring (1951 Two Complete
Science-Fiction Adventure Books; 1968). Later he wrote several stories set
in the imaginary world of Novaria: The Goblin Tower (1968), which is his
most substantial novel of this type, The Clocks of Iraz (1971), The
Fallible Fiend (1973), The Unbeheaded King (1983) and The Honorable
Barbarian (1989) - the first, second and fourth of these five being
assembled as The Reluctant King (omni 1984).LSDC's most notable sf
writings after about 1950 were stories like The Glory that Was (1952
Startling Stories; 1960) and the 1956 title story of A Gun for Dinosaur
(coll 1963), which also included "Aristotle and the Gun" (1958). The first
and third of these tales use history themes, in the case of the third
combined with TIME TRAVEL, in a manner similar to LEST DARKNESS FALL; the
second is a straightforward time-travel story. LSDC produced one of the
earliest books about modern sf, Science Fiction Handbook (1953; rev 1975)
with CACDC; a useful compendium of information and advice for aspiring
writers in its original edition, it gained little from its subsequent
revision - indeed, the revised version omitted some material of interest.
Otherwise he wrote historical novels and nonfiction works, including a
book on MAGIC with CACDC: Spirits, Stars and Spells (1966). His opinions
about the nature of FANTASY and the appropriate decorum necessary to write
within the genre were expressed in an energetic, if sometimes reactionary,
fashion in his many articles. He also wrote definitive lives of H.P.
LOVECRAFT - Lovecraft: A Biography (1975; cut 1976) - and of Robert E.
Howard - Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard (1983) with
CCDC and Jane Whittington Griffin, the latter book having been preceded by
The Miscast Barbarian (1975 chap). In the 1980s, and into his own ninth
decade, more and more often in explicit collaboration with CACDC, he
maintained a remarkable reputation for consistency of output. He was given
the Gandalf (Grand Master) Award for 1976 and the Nebula Grand Master
Award for 1978. His recent work seems agelessly smiling. [MJE/JC]Other
works: Lands Beyond (1952) with Willy LEY, nonfiction, awarded an
INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD; Lost Continents (1954), nonfiction about
ATLANTIS and others; Demons and Dinosaurs (1970), poetry; The Reluctant
Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales (coll 1970); 3000 Years of Fantasy and
Science Fiction (anth 1972) with CACDC; Scribblings (coll 1972); Tales
beyond Time (anth 1973) with CACDC; The Great Fetish (1978); The Purple
Pterodactyls: The Adventures of W. Wilson Newbury, Ensorcelled Financier
(coll of linked stories 1979); The Ragged Edge of Science (1980),
nonfiction; Footprints on Sand (coll 1981) with CACDC; Heroes and
Hobgoblins (coll 1981); The Incorporated Knight (fixup 1987) and its
sequel, The Pixilated Peeress (1991), both with CACDC; The Stones of
Nomuru (1988) with CACDC; The Venom Trees of Sunga (1992); Rivers of Time
(coll 1993).Conan: In terms of internal chronology: Conan (coll 1967) with
Lin CARTER and Robert E. Howard, Conan of Cimmeria (coll 1969) with Carter
and Howard andConan the Freebooter (coll 1968) with Howard, all three
being assembled as The Conan Chronicles (omni 1989 UK);Conan the Wanderer
(coll 1968) with Carter and Howard, Conan the Adventurer (coll 1966) with
Howard, and Conan the Buccaneer (1971) with Carter, all three being
assembled as The Conan Chronicles (omni 1990 UK); Conan the Warrior (anth
1967); Conan the Usurper (coll 1967) with Howard; Howard's own Conan the
Conqueror (1967 edn) ed LSDP; The Return of Conan (1957; vt Conan the
Avenger 1968) with Howard and Bjorn Nyberg; Conan of Aquilonia (coll
1977); Conan of the Isles (1968) with Carter; Conan the Swordsman (coll
1978) with Carter and Nyberg; Conan the Liberator (1979) with Carter; The
Blade of Conan (anth 1979); The Spell of Conan (anth 1980); Conan and the
Spider God (1980); Treasure of Tranicos (1980) with Howard; Conan the
Barbarian * (1982) with Carter, a film tie. (For other Conan books, Robert
E. HOWARD.)About the author: "Neomythology" by Lin Carter (introduction to
LSDC's Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers); Seekers of Tomorrow (1965) by
Sam MOSKOWITZ, Chapter 9; De Camp: An L. Sprague de Camp Bibliography
(1983) by Charlotte Laughlin and Daniel J.H. LEVACK.See also: APES AND
CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EDISONADE; END OF
THE WORLD; EVOLUTION; FINLAND; HIVE-MINDS; HUMOUR; LINGUISTICS; LONGEVITY
(IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MATHEMATICS; NEBULA; NUCLEAR POWER;
PARALLEL WORLDS; POLITICS; PUBLISHING; SCIENCE FANTASY; SOCIOLOGY; TIME
PARADOXES.

De CHAIR, SOMERSET (STRUBEN)
(1911-1995) UK writer whose sf novel, The Teetotalitarian State (1947),
is a not particularly bad-tempered SATIRE set in the NEAR FUTURE and
directed at the Labour Party, then in power in the UK. The contemporary
researcher obsessed by the life of Julian, in Bring Back the Gods: The
Epic Career of the Emperor Julian the Great (1962), eventually comes to
share the experiences of the Roman. [JC]

DeCHANCIE, JOHN
(1946- ) US writer who worked in tv in various capacities before
beginning to publish sf with his Skyway Trilogy: Starrigger (1983), Red
Limit Freeway (1984) and Paradox Alley (1986). Based on a
truckers-in-space premise with some comic potential, the already crowded
tale is complicated by TIME PARADOXES, godlings and much more; the ensuing
epic is at points extremely funny. A second comic sf sequence, the USS
Recluse stories, began with The Kruton Interface (1993); and a third, the
Dr. Dimension series in collaboration with David BISCHOFF, began with Dr.
Dimension (1993) and Dr. Dimension: Masters of Spacetime (1994), both
containing RECURSIVE SF elements.Crooked House (1987) with Thomas F.
MONTELEONE is a horror novel, and the Zelaznyesque Castle Perilous
sequence - Castle Perilous (1988), Castle for Rent (1989), Castle
Kidnapped (1989), Castle War! (1990), Castle Murders (1991),Castle Dreams
(1992) and Castle Spellbound (1992) - is fantasy, as is MagicNet (1993).
JDC has also written two biographies: Peron (1987) and Nasser (1987). [JC]

DECIMA VITTIMA, LA
(vt The Tenth Victim) Film (1965). Champion/Concordia. Dir Elio Petri,
starring Marcello Mastroianni, Ursula Andress, Elsa Martinelli, Massimo
Serato. Screenplay Petri, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra, Giorgio Salvione,
based on "The Seventh Victim" (1953) by Robert SHECKLEY. 92 mins.
Colour.This French-Italian coproduction is based loosely on Sheckley's
story about a future world where, as a safety valve for latent aggression,
the government has legalized duels to the death. In the film two
participants (Mastroianni and Andress) are highly trained individuals
alternating as "hunter" and "victim", each aiming for the 10-kill score
that will bring unlimited privileges. The DYSTOPIAN possibilities are
neglected in favour of the then-fashionable James Bond/thriller approach,
with black jokes and posturing in extravagant costumes. The novelization
is The Tenth Victim * (1966) by Robert Sheckley. [JB]See also: LEISURE.

DEE, ROGER
Working name of US writer Roger Dee Aycock (1914- ) for his fiction,
which he began writing with "The Wheel is Death" for Planet Stories in
1949; he was a prolific contributor to the sf magazines of the early
1950s. His sf novel, An Earth Gone Mad (1954 dos), is a routine adventure.
[JC]

DEEGAN, JON J.
House name created by Gordon Landsborough, editor of AUTHENTIC SCIENCE
FICTION, and used almost exclusively by UK writer Robert (George) Sharp (?
-? ) for novels published in that journal, which for some time early in
its run filled each issue with one long story. The Old Growler series,
beginning with "Reconnoitre Krellig II" in 1951, was signed as by JJD, and
three of its sequels (all by Sharp) were published in book form as
Amateurs in Alchemy (1952), Antro, the Life-Giver (1953) and The Great
Ones (1953). Sharp wrote also a TIME-TRAVEL trilogy, Corridors of Time
(1953), Beyond the Fourth Door (1954) and Exiles in Time (1954). Of
further JJD titles, Underworld of Zello (1952) is by Sharp; authorship of
The Singing Spheres (1952) is unconfirmed. The much earlier Horror Castle
(1936) was published under Sharp's own name, which he generally used for
his crime thrillers. [JC]

DEEPING, (GEORGE) WARWICK
(1877-1950) UK popular novelist, the first of whose many books, Uther &
Igraine (1903), was an Arthurian fantasy, as were The Man on the White
Horse (1934); The Man who Went Back (1940), the latter being a timeslip
epic which takes its protagonist from the 20th-century UK to the time of
the Romans, and returns him wiser and better able to cope with the Nazis;
and The Sword and the Cross (1957). I Live Again (1942) is a REINCARNATION
fantasy that likewise terminates heroically in the Blitz. [JC]

DEEP SPACE NINE
STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE.

DEEPSTAR SIX
Film (1988). Carolco/Tri-Star. Dir and coprod Sean S. Cunningham,
starring Joyce Collins, Greg Evigan, Taurean Blacque, Miguel Ferrer.
Screenplay Lewis Abernathy, Geof Miller, based on a story by Abernathy. 99
mins. Colour.A deep-sea missile base is being installed by underwater
station DeepStar Six. Explosives open a vast cavern under the ocean floor,
in which dwells a monstrous arthropod; it destroys two submersibles,
enters the station, and kills most of the crew one by one. This
no-better-than-competent MONSTER MOVIE was the first of the
strange-things-in-the-ocean sf films of the period, others being Lords of
the Deep (1989), LEVIATHAN (1989) and The ABYSS (1989). Once revealed, the
crayfish-thing is anticlimactic. [PN]

DEER, M.J.
George H. SMITH.

DEFINITIONS OF SF
The term "science fiction" came into general use in the 1930s, an early
appearance being in Hugo GERNSBACK's editorial to #1 of SCIENCE WONDER
STORIES (June 1929). Long before, however, several writers ( Edgar
FAWCETT; Edgar Allan POE; William WILSON) had made attempts to define
species of literary production similar to sf, and other early speculative
writers had their own manifestos. Only since the founding of the
specialist sf PULP MAGAZINES in the USA has there been any measure of
agreement.The category first referred to by Gernsback as SCIENTIFICTION
was described by him thus in the editorial to #1 of AMAZING STORIES (Apr
1926): "By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar
Allan Poe type of story - a charming romance intermingled with scientific
fact and prophetic vision . . . Not only do these amazing tales make
tremendously interesting reading - they are always instructive. They
supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form . . . New adventures
pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible
of realization tomorrow . . . Many great science stories destined to be of
historical interest are still to be written . . . Posterity will point to
them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but
progress as well."This notion of sf as a didactic and progressive
literature with a solid basis in contemporary knowledge was soon revised
as other pulp editors abandoned some of Gernsback's pretensions, but the
emphasis on science remained. A new manifesto was drawn up by John W.
CAMPBELL Jr for Astounding Stories, which, as ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION,
would dominate the field in the 1940s. He proposed that sf should be
regarded as a literary medium akin to science itself: "Scientific
methodology involves the proposition that a well-constructed theory will
not only explain away known phenomena, but will also predict new and still
undiscovered phenomena. Science fiction tries to do much the same - and
write up, in story form, what the results look like when applied not only
to machines, but to human society as well."Within a few years of the
creation of the term "science fiction" a subculture had evolved composed
of writers, magazine editors (and, later, book editors), reviewers and
fans; stories and novels written within this subculture shared certain
assumptions, linguistic and thematic codes which were embedded in the
growing literature, and a sense of isolation from the external "mundane"
world for which those codes remained cryptic. This whole living matrix,
not just the fictional texts that had initially occasioned it, came to be
called "science fiction" ( GENRE SF).Once the publishing category had been
established, readers and critics began using the term with reference to
older works, bringing together all stories which seemed to fit the
specifications. However, the first major study of the field's ancestry was
undertaken by a person from outside it, the academic J.O. BAILEY in
Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947). He identified his material thus:
"A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or
discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and
experiences . . . It must be a scientific discovery - something that the
author at least rationalizes as possible to science."Many further sf
researchers and writers attempted to generate definitions of the form
which would demarcate the contemporary genre and assimilate any
theoretically eligible earlier work. These definitions included attempts
by James BLISH, Reginald BRETNOR, Robert A. HEINLEIN, Damon KNIGHT and
Theodore STURGEON, from within the field, and, from scholars and critics
more or less closely associated it, by Kingsley AMIS and Sam MOSKOWITZ.
Judith MERRIL echoed Campbell's prospectus while borrowing Heinlein's
preferred terminology, which replaced the term "science fiction" by
"speculative fiction": "Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to
explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation,
analogue,hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature
of the universe, of man, or 'reality' . . . I use the term 'speculative
fiction' here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the
traditional 'scientific method' (observation, hypothesis, experiment) to
examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given
set of changes - imaginary or inventive - into the common background of
'known facts', creating an environment in which the responses and
perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions,
the characters, or both."The emphasis in all of these earlier definitions
falls on the presence of "science", or at least scientific method, as a
necessary part of the fiction. The Merril definition, however, clearly (by
shifting from science itself to the idea of extrapolation) is rather
wider, since it would include stories which depict social change without
necessarily making much fuss over scientific development; and indeed such
stories were becoming very popular in the magazines during the 1950s and
1960s, the period during which Merril did most of her writing and editing.
Oddly enough, the most obvious element in the magazine sf that is the
initial focus of nearly all of these earlier definitions is not much
mentioned in them: the overwhelming majority of the sf of this period -
especially in the USA - was set in the future. (By contrast, most 19th-
and early-20th-century sf was displaced from the normal world through
space rather than time.) With an enjoyable lack of responsibility about
using the future to teach us about the present, writers like E.E. "Doc"
SMITH, in his Lensman series, freed the future for "itself", and the
effect of this new freedom was, in literary terms, explosive. From this
the characteristic (and addictive) flavour of US sf derives: its relaxed
embracing of scale and technology, its narrative fluency and, perhaps, its
secret impatience with reason. Most descriptive definitions of sf from the
period 1940-70 look with hindsight surprisingly unsatisfactory and rather
constricting - damagingly indifferent, in fact, to the actual shape of sf
texts.In the 1960s a new line of thought, stemming in large part from the
UK, saw sf re-emphasized as a global literature with 19th-century roots
rather than as a purely US phenomenon nurtured in the pulp magazines from
the 1920s onwards. This wider perspective on sf tends to de-emphasize its
science/technology component. The term "science fiction" itself came in
for criticism from Brian W. ALDISS, who commented that sf is no more
written for scientists than ghost stories are for ghosts. J.G. BALLARD
remarked in 1969 that "the idea that a magazine like Astounding, or Analog
as it's now called, has anything to do with the sciences is ludicrous. You
have only to pick up a journal like Nature, say, or any scientific
journal, and you can see that science belongs in a completely different
world." In Billion Year Spree (1973; rev vt Trillion Year Spree 1986 by
Aldiss and David WINGROVE) Aldiss offered the remark - it seems more an
observation describing a philosophical outlook than a definition - that
"science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in
the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of
knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or
post-Gothic mode" ( GOTHIC SF). By placing Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein
(1818) at the head of this tradition, Aldiss effectively (and
influentially) argued that sf was a child begotten upon Gothic Romance by
the Industrial and Scientific Revolution of the early 19th century. More
recent critics, like Brian M. STABLEFORD in Scientific Romance in Britain
1890-1950 (1985), have likewise somewhat undercut those definitions that
appear to fit most closely an idea of sf as a genre first cultured in US
magazines ( SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE).The 1970s as a whole witnessed a great
upsurge of academic interest in sf ( SF IN THE CLASSROOM), especially in
the USA, and with it, naturally enough, came more rigorous and formal
attempts to define sf. To teach a subject you need to know what it is;
and, especially in the case of sf (which blurs so easily into FANTASY on
one side and POSTMODERNIST fictions- FABULATIONS - on another,
TECHNOTHRILLERS and political thrillers on a third, mainstream works about
scientific discovery on a fourth, not to mention LOST-WORLD stories or
UTOPIAS or future- WAR stories or stories set in the prehistoric past),
you also need to know what it isn't. Thus in academic definitions there
was a new emphasis on drawing the boundaries of sf more precisely, in
terms of its literary strategies as well as its ideational content,
sometimes using a vocabulary already developed in different spheres of
literary criticism by structuralist and other critics.In 1972 Darko SUVIN
defined sf as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions
are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose
main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's
empirical environment". By "cognition" Suvin appears to mean the seeking
of rational understanding, and by "estrangement" something akin to Bertolt
Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, defined in 1948 thus: "A representation which
estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same
time make it seem unfamiliar." Perhaps the most important part of Suvin's
definition, and the easiest with which to agree, is the emphasis he puts
on what he and others have called a "novum", a new thing - some difference
between the world of the fiction and what Suvin calls the "empirical
environment", the real world outside. The presence of a novum is
insufficient in itself, of course, to define sf, since the different and
older tradition of fantasy likewise depends on the novum. Peter NICHOLLS,
pointing to this particularly blurred demarcation line, argues that sf
must by definition follow natural law whereas fantasy may and mostly does
suspend it. Fantasy need not be susceptible to "natural" or cognitive
explanation; indeed, supernatural explanation is at fantasy's heart.
(Suvin claims that the commercial linking of sf and fantasy is "a
rampantly pathological phenomenon". This dividing line is further
discussed under MAGIC.) As to estrangement, it arguably has little to do
with at least the US tradition of sf (although a great deal to do with
European traditions of SATIRE), in which an important component is
nostalgia for the familiar - even the familiarly new ( CLICHES) - and
estrangement is significantly absent. John CLUTE has argued that much sf
seeks to create the exact opposite of estrangement; that is, it works to
make the incredible seem plausible and familiar. Nonetheless, while
Suvin's definition would find few who agreed with all of it, it is
challenging and has perhaps been the most useful of all in catalysing
debate on the issue.It is to be expected that disagreements of this sort
should take place, since sf itself is not homogeneous, and at different
times - sometimes both at once - its strategy is either to comment on our
own world through the use of metaphor and extrapolation or to create
genuine imaginative alternatives to our own world.The first of these
alternatives is the one emphasized in Structural Fabulation (1975) by
Robert SCHOLES, who defines FABULATION as "fiction that offers us a world
clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to
confront that known world in some cognitive way". Unqualified, the
definition would fit not only GENRE SF but also the fabulations of John
BARTH, Richard BRAUTIGAN, Jorge Luis BORGES and Thomas PYNCHON, works
which are quite often annexed to sf though having a different
characteristic flavour. Scholes recognizes this when he goes on to the
specific case of "structural fabulation" (yet another term substituting
for "science fiction" and sharing the initials "sf") in which "the
tradition of speculative fiction is modified by an awareness of the
universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures, and the
insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points
of departure. Yet structural fabulation is neither scientific in its
methods nor a substitute for actual science. It is a fictional exploration
of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent
science. Its favourite themes involve the impact of developments or
revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people
who must live with those revelations or developments."All definitions of
sf have a component of prescription (what sf writers ought to do, and what
their motives, purposes and philosophies ought to be) as well as
description (what they habitually do do, and what kind of things tend to
accumulate under the label). It is, however, only in the later academic
definitions by authors like Suvin and Scholes, who are noticeably reticent
as regards what sf is actually about, that we find prescription getting
the upper hand. It is possible with almost all definitions, especially of
the prescriptive sort, to find examples which do not fit the prescription.
No one has yet emerged with a prescription sufficiently inclusive to
satisfy all or even most readers. (If the editors of this encyclopedia
have erred, it has been on the side of inclusiveness.)Some other academic
definitions have been less inclusive than Suvin's or Scholes's. Leslie
FIEDLER, for example, argues (in Partisan Review Fall 1965) that the myth
of sf is the dream of apocalypse, "the myth of the end of man, of the
transcendence or transformation of the human - a vision quite different
from that of the extinction of our species by the Bomb, which seems
stereotype rather than archetype". In his New Worlds for Old: The
Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction and American Literature (1974)
David KETTERER expands on Fiedler's point at length, dividing sf into
three categories (according to the type of extrapolation involved) and
concentrating on the third: "Philosophically oriented science fiction,
extrapolating on what we know in the context of our vaster ignorance,
comes up with a startling donnee, or rationale, that puts humanity in a
radically new perspective." This he sees as a subcategory of "apocalyptic
literature" which, by "the creation of other worlds", causes a
"metaphorical destruction of [the] 'real' world in the reader's
head".Alvin TOFFLER, author of Future Shock (1970), a study of the
increasing rate of change in the real world, wrote in 1974 that sf, "by
dealing with possibilities not ordinarily considered - alternative worlds,
alternative visions - widens our repertoire of possible responses to
change". Here is the beginning of a definition of sf in terms of its
social function rather than of its intrinsic nature, a little more
sophisticated than Marshall McLuhan's earlier comment in The Medium and
the Massage (1967): "Science fiction writing today presents situations
that enable us to perceive the potential of new technologies."In 1987 Kim
Stanley ROBINSON wrote in FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION that
sf was "an historical literature . . . In every sf narrative, there is an
explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted
to our present moment, or to some moment of our past." Commenting in 1992
in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION on this formulation, John Clute
suggested that it underlined the sense US sf conveyed of being connected
to the linear, time-bound logic of the Western World.Unfortunately, the
clearest (or most aggressive) definitions are often the least definitive,
although many sceptics have been attracted to Damon Knight's "Science
fiction is what we point to when we say it" or Norman SPINRAD's "Science
fiction is anything published as science fiction". Both these
"definitions" have a serious point, of course: that, whatever else sf may
be, it is certainly a publishing category, and in the real world this is
of more pragmatic importance than anything the theorists may have to say
about it. On the other hand, the label "sf" on a book is wholly subject to
the whims of publishers and editors, and the label has certainly appeared
on some very unlikely books. An additional complication arises because
some writers fight hard to avoid the label, perhaps feeling that it might
deleteriously affect their sales and/or reputations (e.g., Kurt VONNEGUT
Jr, John WYNDHAM). Publishers apply similar cautionary measures to
potential bestsellers, which are seldom labelled as sf even when that is
exactly what they are (although this has been less true in the post- STAR
WARS period than in, say, the 1970s), on the grounds that genre sf when so
labelled, while normally selling steadily, rarely enters the bestseller
class.There is really no good reason to expect that a workable definition
of sf will ever be established. None has been, so far. In practice, there
is much consensus about what sf looks like in its centre; it is only at
the fringes that most of the fights take place. And it is still not
possible to describe sf as a homogeneous form of writing. Sf is arguably
not a genre in the strict sense at all - and why should it be?
Historically, it grew from the merging of many distinct genres, from
utopias to space adventures. Instinctively, however, we may feel that, if
sf ever loses its sense of the fluidity of the future and the excitement
of our scientific attempts to understand our Universe - in short, as more
conservative fans would put it with enthusiasm though conceptual
vagueness, its SENSE OF WONDER - then it may no longer be worth fighting
over. If things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, mere structural
fabulation may be loosed upon the world!For a listing of many definitions,
including some of those referred to but not actually quoted above, a good
source is the "Science Fiction" entry in Critical Terms for Science
Fiction and Fantasy (1986) by Gary K. WOLFE. [BS/JC/PN]

DEFOE, DANIEL
(1660-1731) UK merchant, professional spy and writer, extremely prolific
author of many works of various kinds, though the huge canon of unsigned
works attributed to him has in recent years been convincingly diminished.
He is best known today for his novel The Life and Strange Surprizing
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719) and its sequels,
which, while not sf, provided a fundamental model for many sf stories (
ROBINSONADE). Of interest to students of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION is The
Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World of the Moon
(1705; various savagely cut edns under vts 1705-41), in which a mechanical
spirit-driven flying machine, the Consolidator, enables various satirical
( SATIRE) observations to be made from a lunar viewpoint. A Journal of the
Plague Year (1722), in effect a historical novel set in 1665, a year DD
could presumably barely remember, is a prototype of the DISASTER novel.
Some associational short work can be found in Tales of Piracy, Crime, and
Ghosts (coll 1945 US). [JC/PN]See also: MACHINES; MOON; SPACE FLIGHT.

DEFONTENAY, C(HARLEMAGNE) I(SCHIR)
(1814-1856) French writer whose Star, ou Psi de Cassiopee (1854; trans P.
J. Sokolowski as Star 1975 US, with intro by Pierre VERSINS) describes the
discovery in the Himalayas of a box full of information about life on
another planet. The biological and anthropological speculation is
interesting; the translation lacks the inventive fluency of the original.
[JC/PN]See also: STARS.

deFORD, MIRIAM ALLEN
(1888-1975) US writer, a newspaper reporter for many years; probably
known better for her many mystery stories (some award-winning) than for
the sf of her later years. Her publications also include such nonfiction
as The Real Bonnie and Clyde (1968) and her work as contributing editor to
The Humanist. She edited Space, Time and Crime (anth 1964), a collection
of sf stories with mystery elements. As an author of sf stories in her own
right, she published over 30 items - beginning with "Last Generation" in
1946 for Harper's Magazine - in various magazines, though most of the
stories in her two collections, Xenogenesis (coll 1969) and Elsewhere,
Elsewhen, Elsehow (coll 1971), had first appeared in FSF. Her examinations
of themes such as nuclear devastation and sexual roles is conducted in a
crisp, clearcut style that sometimes lacks grace but never vigour. [JC]See
also: WOMEN SF WRITERS.

DEGAL, ALDION
[r] YUGOSLAVIA.

De GRAEFF, ALLEN
Pseudonym of Albert Paul Blaustein (1921- ), professor of law at Rutgers
from 1955, under which he edited Human and Other Beings (anth 1963). He
was uncredited co-compiler of three anthologies with his friend Basil
DAVENPORT: Deals with the Devil (anth 1958), Invisible Men (anth 1960) and
Famous Monster Tales (anth 1967). [PN]

De HAVEN, TOM
(1949- ) US writer who began publishing sf with his first novel, Freaks'
Amour (1979), set in 1988 among a group of MUTANTS created by an atomic
mishap, and following their lives as itinerant performers. A similar
inclination to place a large connected cast in a surreally threatening
world impels the otherwise very different Funny Papers (1985), a kind of
urban fantasy/alternate history set at the end of the 19th century in a
magic-realist New York ( ALTERNATE WORLDS; FABULATION) and concentrating
on the newspaper business at the point when COMIC strips were first
becoming widely popular. In the long third section of Sunburn Lake (coll
of linked stories 1988), TDH applied his easy fabulistic manner to
21st-century New Jersey. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, TDH gave
some sense that he was dissipating his energies, producing a sharp but
unremarkable tie in U.S.S.A. Book 1 * (1987), a juvenile, Joe Gosh (1988),
which may have been SHARECROPPED, and Neuromancer: The Graphic Novel:
Volume 1 * (graph 1989) illus Bruce Jensen. But the fantasy sequence
Chronicles of the King's Tramp represented a significant return of energy:
Walker of Worlds (1990),The End-of-Everything Man (1991), and The Last
Human (1992) traverse familiar territory - a sequence of PARALLEL WORLDS
nested into an ontological hierarchy - with panache and knowing clarity.
[JC]Other works: Jersey Luck (1980), associational.See also: CHILDREN'S
SF.

DEIGHTON, LEN
Working name of Leonard Cyril Deighton (1929- ), UK writer of spy novels,
cookery books and some other nonfiction, still perhaps best known for his
early espionage thrillers, such as The Ipcress File (1962), several of
which feature the same undisciplined secret agent. The fourth volume of
the series, Billion-Dollar Brain (1966), is set in an indeterminate NEAR
FUTURE and deals with a super- COMPUTER and a private preventive war
launched on Russia across the ice from Finland by a mad tycoon; it was
filmed as Billion Dollar Brain (1967) dir Ken Russell. In SS-GB (1978) the
UK suffers German occupation from 1941 ( HITLER WINS). [JC]

DELAIRE, JEAN
Pseudonym of Mrs Muirson Blake (? -? ), whose date of birth has been
listed as an improbably late 1888, editor of Christian Theosophist. JD's
Around a Distant Star (1904) has two young fellows travelling on an
electrically propelled FASTER-THAN-LIGHT spacecraft to a planet about 1900
light years away, so that, after avoiding carnivorous plants, they can
witness through a supertelescope the death and resurrection of Christ.
[PN]Other works: A Pixie's Adventures in Humanland (1926).

DELANEY, JOSEPH H(ENRY)
(1932- ) US lawyer and writer, associated through most of his career with
ASF, for which magazine he began publishing sf with "Brainchild" in 1982 (
APES AND CAVEMEN). He made considerable impact with his second story, "In
the Face of My Enemy"(1983), which became part of his first solo novel, In
the Face of my Enemy (fixup 1985), a SPACE OPERA featuring an immortal
shape-changer. His first novel, Valentina: Soul in Sapphire (fixup 1984)
with Marc STIEGLER, rather more grippingly depicts the efforts of the
eponymous AI to gain memory space in networked mainframes across the
world, and to prove her selfhood. Lords Temporal (1987) is a TIME-TRAVEL
tale of some ingenuity. [JC]See also: COMPUTERS.

DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY)
(1942- ) US author and critic, one of the most influential and most
discussed within the genre; he has taught at several universities from
1975, and from 1988 has been professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Massachusetts. He has a somewhat mixed cultural background:
he is Black, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and therefore familiar
with the Black ghetto; but his father, a wealthy funeral-parlour
proprietor, had the family brought up in privileged, upper-middle-class
circumstances - SRD was educated at the prestigious Bronx High School of
Science (although he left college after only one term). This double
background is evident in all his writing.He became famous as one of the
youthful prodigies of sf. Unusually, his first published sf was a novel,
published when he was 20: The Jewels of Aptor (1962 dos; restored 1968;
rev 1971 UK); the later versions restore the third of the book which had
originally been excised at ACE BOOKS. This was followed by the The Fall of
the Towers trilogy: Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the
Dead City 1968 UK), The Towers of Toron (1964 dos; rev 1968 UK) and City
of a Thousand Suns (1965; rev 1969 UK), all assembled as The Fall of the
Towers (omni of rev texts 1970). Another early novel was The Ballad of
Beta-2 (1965 dos; text corrected 1977).The early novels had certain
similarities, and some of the themes initiated in them have recurred
regularly in SRD's work. The plot structure is almost invariably that of a
quest, or some form of FANTASTIC VOYAGE. Physically and psychologically
damaged participants are common. An economical use of colourful detail,
often initially surprising but logical when considered, is used to flesh
out the social background of the stories. There is an interest in
MYTHOLOGY, taking the form of metaphorical allusion to existing myths or
of an investigation of the way new myths are formed; this is central to
The Ballad of Beta-2, in which a student anthropologist investigates the
facts behind a folk song garnered from a primitive Earth culture which has
gone voyaging in a fleet of GENERATION STARSHIPS. This novel also shows an
interest in problems of COMMUNICATIONS and LINGUISTICS which was to become
central to SRD's work. The Fall of the Towers, too, is full of colourful
cultural speculation, although its melodramatic story of war, mutations,
mad computers and a malign cosmic intelligence is moderately conventional.
The original three volumes of The Fall of the Towers were set in the same
post- HOLOCAUST Earth as The Jewels of Aptor; however, the linking
references were removed in the revised edition.SRD published two more
novels in 1966: Empire Star (1966 dos; text corrected 1977) and BABEL-17
(1966; rev 1969 UK). Both, especially the latter, which won a NEBULA,
reveal a notable advance in sophistication. BABEL-17, whose chapters carry
epigraphs from the work of SRD's wife (1961-80), the poet Marilyn Hacker
(1942- ), is about language, and has a poet heroine. In a future galactic
society, radio broadcasts in an apparently alien language are received;
they are thought to be connected with sabotage and alien invasion. Much of
the novel is to do with cracking the language. SRD believes that our
PERCEPTION of reality is partly formed by our languages; the invention of
different societies in this novel, more intense and imaginative than his
previous work, is mostly rendered in terms of thought- and
speech-patterns.In 1967 he began publishing short stories also. Algis
BUDRYS (Gal Jan 1969) called him "the best science-fiction writer in the
world". He was generally seen as being in the forefront of the NEW WAVE,
emphasizing cultural speculation, the soft sciences, psychology and
mythology over technology and HARD SF. The short story "Aye, and Gomorrah
. . ." (1967) won a Nebula, and the novelette "Time Considered as a Helix
of Semi-Precious Stones" (1969) won both HUGO and Nebula. These two, with
BABEL-17 and THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, his other Nebula-winning novel,
can be found in his The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (omni 1986).
It can be argued that THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967; 1 chapter restored
1968 UK) is his most satisfying work, along with the next novel, NOVA
(1968; text corrected 1969) and the novella The Star Pit (1967; 1988 chap
dos). The latter can be found in SRD's excellent first collection
DRIFTGLASS (coll 1971) together with all of his best shorter work of the
period. THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION is remarkably compressed and densely
patterned with allusive imagery. Earth has lost its humans (how is never
made clear) and their corporeal form has been taken on by a race of aliens
who, in an attempt to make coherent sense of the human artefacts among
which they live, take on human traditions, too. Avatars of Ringo Starr,
Billy the Kid and Christ appear; the hero, a Black musician who plays
tunes on his murderous machete, is Orpheus and Theseus. The book is a tour
de force, though a cryptic one, since the bafflement of the protagonists
trying to make sense of their transformed lives tends to transfer to the
reader. SRD's own diaries provide part of the text of the novel. NOVA is
the Prometheus story and the Grail story combined in an ebulliently
inventive space opera/quest; the fire from the heavens, the glowing heart
of the Grail, is found only at the heart of an exploding nova. Passages of
high rhetoric are mingled (as they often are, too, in the work of SRD's
contemporary Roger ZELAZNY) with relaxed slang and thieves' argot. The
book features a characteristic SRD protagonist,
thecriminal/outcast/musician/artist whose literary genealogy goes back
through Jean Genet (1910-1986) all the way to Francois Villon (1431-1485).
The variety of cultures in these and other novels by SRD has the effect of
making morality and ethics seem relative, pluralistic. Divers forms of
bizarre human behaviour, many of which would have been seen as antisocial
in US society of the time, emerge as natural in the circumstances created.
The Star Pit, too, is a highly structured work; its central image is that
of ant-colony/cage/trap/micro-ecology, and escape is seen to be intimately
linked with emotional mutilation, even psychosis.SRD's next novel - not
sf, though with elements of the fantastic - was the pornographic The Tides
of Lust (1973; vt Equinox 1994); the title was not his. (A second
pornographic novel, Hogg, remains unpublished, though The Mad Man (1994),
which continues in the same vein, has seen print.) It is likely to shock
most readers in its evocation of extreme sado-masochism in imagery which
is sometimes poetic and often disgusting - and so intended - perhaps as a
Baudelairean ritual of passage. It was, indeed, in the mid-1970s that it
became generally known that SRD was bisexual. Certainly, all his later
work is deeply concerned with the cultural mechanisms - actual,
theoretical and sometimes labyrinthine - of eroticism and love. Much light
is thrown on the relationship between SRD's own sexuality and the sf he
wrote in the 1960s by his much later book, The Motion of Light in Water:
Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1957-65 (1988; exp vt
The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction
Writing: 1960-65; with The Column at the Market's Edge 1990 UK). This
book, frank and priapic to the verge of the scabrous, won a Hugo for Best
Non-Fiction.SRD's next two novels were DHALGREN (1975; 6th impression has
many typographical errors rectified; text further corrected 1977) and
Triton (1976). After a six-year gap in which SRD had published little or
no sf, DHALGREN was controversial. It is very long, and his critics see it
as perilously self-indulgent and flabby, lacking the old economy of
effect. It became a bestseller, however, and other critics saw it as his
most successfully ambitious work to date. An anonymous youth, the Kid,
comes to the violent, nihilist city of Bellona, where order has fled and
there are two moons in the sky, though the rest of the NEAR-FUTURE USA is
apparently normal. He becomes an artist, couples and fights, and writes a
book that might be DHALGREN before leaving the city. The opening sentence
completes the unfinished final sentence and an enigmatic circle. It is a
book primarily about the possibilities and difficulties of a youth
culture, and partly about being a writer. Triton is more traditionally
structured, but in some ways more sophisticated. It presents a series of
future societies differentiated mainly along sexual lines; the male
protagonist, who begins by displaying a rather insensitive, traditional
machismo, ultimately chooses to become a woman, but remains alienated.
Triton (a moon of Neptune) is an "ambiguous heterotopia" with a
bewildering variety of available lifestyles. The book poses interesting
questions about sexuality, and also about freedom of choice.Since then SRD
has published one singleton novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
(1984), and four books in the Neveryon series, which masquerades as
SWORD-AND-SORCERY fantasy: Tales of Neveryon (coll of linked stories 1979;
rev 1988); Neveryona (1983; rev 1989 UK); Flight from Neveryon (coll of
linked stories 1985; rev 1989 UK) and The Bridge of Lost Desire (coll of
linked stories 1987; rev vt Return to Neveryon 1989 UK). Stars in My
Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the first volume of a projected diptych, is an
exotic piece set in a galactic civilization. A complex narrative again
asks questions about the arbitrary and parochial nature of our ethical
expectations, using various forms of enjoyed degradation to make the
point. It is probably SRD's most important work of the 1980s. The Neveryon
books adopt a similar strategy of culture-building, and play both with and
against the readers' expectations. They are, in fact, sf in the sense that
they invent alien societies, though technically they are FANTASY, being
set in a distant, fantastic, pre-industrial past, and to a degree act as
both critique and re-creation of the Mighty-Thewed Barbarian genre. SRD's
treatment of the idea of bondage, for example, is infinitely more
sophisticated, and somewhat more elusive, than that of, say, John NORMAN
in the Gor books. Many ideas are explored, from the erotic to the
economic, the concept of slavery appearing in both these idea-sets, and
the slave-collar itself coming to be the prime erotically charged symbol;
the later volumes make clear reference to the AIDS epidemic. Though
allusive, ambitious, self-reflexive, seriously intended books, they do
return in style to something reminiscent of the wittier, more economic,
more playful SRD of the 1960s, and are among the more accessible works of
his past two decades.During the six-year hiatus (from about 1969) in his
own fiction, SRD began to pay more attention to other people's. Much of
the resulting critical and semiotic writing has been collected in four
books: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
(coll 1977), The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction
by Thomas M. Disch - Angouleme (1978), Starboard Wine: More Notes on the
Language of Science Fiction (coll 1984) and The Straits of Messina (coll
1989). Delany's criticism is often post-structuralist and to a degree
POSTMODERNIST, very aware of a contemporary literary context that goes
well beyond sf, sometimes very wordy, but important in its persistent
attempt to describe sf in terms of the protocols required for reading it.
As SRD said in his acceptance speech after receiving the 1985 PILGRIM
AWARD for excellence in sf criticism, "We must learn to read science
fiction as science fiction." The second of the four books, an analysis of
the structure and images of the short story "Angouleme" (1971; later
incorporated in 334 [fixup 1972]) by Thomas M. DISCH, is written with a
spectacularly microscopic fastidiousness. The Straits of Messina collects
mostly pieces by SRD that were originally published as by K. Leslie
Steiner, a pseudonym he uses when writing about his own work. The first
and third books, essays on the language of sf, are perhaps of the most
general interest. A fifth critical book, Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and
20th Century Critical Fictions (1988 chap), does not bear directly on sf;
though a sixth, Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science
Fiction, and Some Comics (coll 1994) contained material of genre interest;
With Marilyn Hacker SRD edited a series of original anthologies, QUARK,
preferring the term "speculative fiction" to "science fiction", and
emphasizing experimental writing. There were 4 vols 1970-71.With hindsight
it can be hypothesized that SRD has had different audiences at different
points of his career: a very wide, traditional sf readership up to and
including DHALGREN, which sold nearly a million copies in the USA alone;
and a narrower, perhaps more intellectual, campus-based readership
thereafter. There is no doubt that by the 1980s his fiction (and
criticism) had become less accessible, and the real debate about his
career must be whether or not he gained more than he lost with his
adoption of a denser style towards the later 1970s. At this point his
fiction also began to include more passages of obviously polemical intent,
some of whose thrust, especially in their icons of abasement, did not
carry conviction for all readers. But, though admirers of SRD's earlier
work tend to be heavily polarized in their views of his later work, he by
no means disappeared from popular notice. The first two volumes of the
Neveryon series sold around quarter of a million each. Lower sales on
subsequent editions may have been partly due to resistance in the
publishing and book-distribution worlds to his increasingly and explicitly
controversial texts. [PN]Other works: Empire: A Visual Novel (graph 1978),
a GRAPHIC NOVEL written by SRD and executed by Howard V. CHAYKIN; Heavenly
Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1979), autobiographical, about
life in a commune in New York; Distant Stars (coll 1981), which includes
Empire Star and contains 3 stories not included in DRIFTGLASS; We in Some
Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line (1968 FSF; 1990 chap dos);
They Fly at Ciron (fixup 1993), a text based on "They Fly at Ciron" (1971
FSF) with James SALLIS, plus other material by SRD alone, all thoroughly
revised.As Editor: Nebula Award Winners 13 (anth 1980).About the author:
The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered as a Writer of
Semi-Precious Words (1977 chap) by George Edgar SLUSSER; Worlds out of
Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany (1979) by Douglas BARBOUR; Samuel
R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962-1979 (1980) by
Michale W. Peplow and Robert S. Bravard; Samuel R. Delany (1982 chap) by
J.B. Weedman; Samuel R. Delany (1985) by Seth MCEVOY.See also: ARTS;
CHILDREN IN SF; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT;
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; CYBERPUNK; CYBORGS; DEVOLUTION;
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IN SCIENCE FICTION.

DELAP, RICHARD
(1942-1987) US editor, reviewer and writer who entered the sf world as a
fan and soon began to publish book reviews, beginning with pieces in the
FANZINE Granfalloon and moving on to a column in AMAZING STORIES during
the 1960s. In Delap's Fantasy and Science Fiction Review Magazine he
created a valuable review organ, whose folding was regretted. He co-edited
with Terry DOWLING and Gil Lamont The Essential Ellison (coll 1987). His
first novel, Shapes (1987) with Walt LEE, is a horror tale about an
extraterrestrial shape-changer. [JC]

DELICATESSAN
Film (1990). Constellation/UCG/Hachette Premiere with the collaboration
of Sofinergie/Sofinergie 2/Investimage 2/Investimage 3. Directed and
written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro; starring Dominique Pinon,
Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Karin Viard, Ticky Holgado,
Anne-Marie Pisani, Jacques Mathou, Rufus. 99 mins. Colour.This French film
is an ABSURDIST fable about life after the HOLOCAUST in a small, decrepit
town. The setting is enclosed; little is intimated about life outside, or
the nature of the apocalypse that must have occurred. The local butcher
(Dreyfus) does not let his various eccentric tenants-one of whom builds
gracefully cranky suicide machines - starve; he hires transients as
handymen then kills them for the meat; but the new handyman, a one-time
circus clown Louison (Pinon), is attractive to the butcher's short-sighted
daughter (Dougnac).She intervenes, as do the local underground vegetarian
terrorists, the Troglodists. The film is surreal, grotesque, but, given
its subject matter, amazingly gentle and forgiving, and curiously
accepting of the fact that society is running down completely and there
seems no way, or even desire, to wind it up again. Owing much to French
pop culture (its more intellect facets,including up-market comics like
METAL HURLANT) this film soon became a cult favourite,overseas as well as
in France. [PN]

DeLILLO, DON
(1936- ) US writer who very rapidly established a reputation for
brilliance and seriousness. His fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976),
subjects its sf material - it examines the personal and cognitive cruces
surrounding the decipherment of a message from the star of the title - to
a formidable array of contemporary intellectual procedures, while
presenting its numerous characters as in-depth portraits of the
fundamental obsessions at the heart of contemporary US intellectual life.
The book stands as a model (a rather humbling one for GENRE SF) of the
extraordinary complexity of response that any genuine message from the
stars would (it is reasonable to assume) elicit. Several DD novels - like
Great Jones Street (1973) and White Noise (1985) - subject their
protagonists to sf-like revelations of the nature of reality through
psychotopic drugs and devices; and the game of terror played in The Names
(1982) smacks of OULIPO. Throughout his career, DD has been an author of
FABULATIONS, the burden of which has been to expose his characters to
unbearable images of the world we live in. [JC]About the author:
Introducing Don DeLillo (anth 1991) ed Frank Lentricchia.

De LINT, CHARLES (HENRI DIEDERICK HOEFSMIT)
(1951- ) Canadian musician and writer, born in the Netherlands, who
established himself during the 1980s as a prolific FANTASY author and as a
significant and original contributor to the subgenre of contemporary
fantasy, beginning with "The Fane of the Grey Rose" in Swords Against
Darkness IV (anth 1979) ed Andrew J. OFFUTT. Some of CDL's short work has
appeared as by Tanuki Aki, Henri Cuiscard, Jan Penalurick, Cerin
Songweaver and Wendelessen, and one horror novel, Angel of Darkness (1990
US), was as by Samuel M. Key. CDL's output (see list below), which is both
various and polished, merits extended consideration; and the urban fantasy
sequence centred on the imaginary city of Newford (which resembles Ottawa)
is of interest, and includes Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair (1987 IASFM; 1991
chap US), The Stone Drum (1989 chap), Ghosts of Wind and Shadow (1990
chap), Paperjack (1991 chap US) and Our Lady of the Harbour (1991 chap US)
all assembled with other work as Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
(omni 1993 US); Mr.Truepenny's Book Emporium and Gallery (1992 chap US),
The Bone Woman (1992 chap), The Wishing Well (1993 chap US) and Coyote
Stories (1993 chap), all assembled with other work as The Ivory and the
Horn: A Newford Collection (omni 1995 US); and Memory and Dream (1994 US).
But he is mentioned here primarily for his one sf novel, Svaha (1989 US),
a NEAR-FUTURE tale set in enclaves established by high-tech Native
Americans to fend off the barbarian world outside. A kind of sweetish
simplicity sometimes overloads his fantasy tales, especially the earlier
ones; it might be surmised that a writer of CDL's energy and ambition may
increasingly find that genre-crossing provides him with a necessary
stimulus and threat. [JC]Other works: The Oak King's Daughter (1979 chap),
published, like several other short texts here listed, by CDL's own
Triskell Press; The Moon is a Meadow (1980 chap); De Grijze Roose ["The
Grey Rose"] (coll trans Johan Vanhecke et al. 1983 Netherlands); The
Calendar of the Trees (1984 chap); Moonheart: A Romance (1984 US) and its
sequels Ascian in Rose (1987 chap US), Westlin Wind (1989 chap
US),Ghostwood (1990) and Merlin Dreams in Moondream Wood (1992 chap), all
four sequels assembled as Spiritwalk (omni 1992 US); The Riddle of the
Wren (1984 US); The Three Plushketeers and the Garden Slugs (1985 chap); A
Pattern of Silver Strings (1981 chap), the first volume in the projected
Legend of Cerin Songweaver sequence which continues withGlass Eyes and
Cotton Strings (1982 chap), In Mask and Motley (1983 chap), Laughter in
the Leaves (1984 chap), The Badger in the Bag (1985 chap), The Harp of the
Grey Rose (1979 as "The Fane of The Gray Rose"; exp 1985 US), And the
Rafters Were Ringing (1986 chap) and The Lark in the Morning (1987 chap);
Mulengro: A Romany Tale (1985 US); Yarrow: An Autumn Tale (1986 US); The
Lark in the Morning (1987 chap); Jack, the Giant-Killer: The Jack of
Kinrowan: A Novel of Urban Faerie (1987 US); The Drowned Man's Reel (1988
chap); Greenmantle (1988 US); Wolf Moon (1988 US); a contribution to the
SHARED-WORLD Borderland enterprise run by Terri WINDLING, Berlin * (1989
chap); two ties - Philip Jose Farmer's The Dungeon, #3: The Valley of
Thunder * (1989 US) and #5: The Hidden City * (1990 US); The Fair in Emain
Macha (1985 Space & Time #68; exp 1990 dos US); The Dreaming Place (1990
US); Drink Down the Moon: A Novel of Urban Faerie (1990 US); The Little
Country (1991 US); Cafe Purgatorium (coll 1991 US) with stories,
separately, by Dana Anderson and Ray Garton; Hedgework and Guessery (coll
1991 US); ; Into the Green (1993); The Wild WoodSee also: CANADA.

de l'ISLE ADAM, VILLIERS
[r] VILLIERS DE L'ISLE ADAM.

DELIUS, ANTHONY (RONALD ST. MARTIN)
(1916- ) South African poet who eventually moved to the UK. His SATIRE on
South African POLITICS and apartheid, The Last Division (1959), sends a
1980s Union Parliament to a Hell and Devil closely resembling those in
Wyndham LEWIS's The Childermass (1928), where they re-create, under their
Premier's inspiration, the social system they left behind. The swingeing
satirical power of this book-length poem is remarkable. Its views on South
Africa's future contrast markedly with those expressed by Garry ALLIGHAM
and are comparable with those of Arthur KEPPEL-JONES, though sharper. Less
interestingly, The Day Natal Took Off (1963) depicts that state's
secession from South Africa. [JC]

DELL, DUDLEY
[s] Horace L. GOLD.

DEL MARTIA, ASTRON
House name invented by publisher Stephen FRANCES for his own publishing
house, and used there by John Russell FEARN on The Trembling World (1949).
The name was then sold on to Gaywood Press, which used it for three more
tales: Dawn of Darkness (1951 chap), Space Pirates (1951) and Interstellar
Espionage (1952 chap). The latter story features a security officer called
Dog who appears also in Spawn of Space (1951) by Franz Harkon, an
unattributed pseudonym. A fifth ADM story was advertised but never
published, although the name was revived by Frances in a reprint of his
One Against Time (1954 as by Hank JANSON; 1969 as by ADM). [SH/PN]

DELMONT, JOSEPH
Pseudonym of German writer Karl Pick (1873-1935), whose Die Stadt unter
dem Meer (1925; trans anon as The Submarine City 1930 UK) features the
construction by U-boat crews of an UNDER-THE-SEA city from which it is
intended to conquer the world. Some of the stories assembled in English as
The Dead City (coll trans anon 1932 UK) are sf, as is Der Ritt auf dem
Funken (1928; trans anon as Mistress of the Skies 1932 UK). The
protagonists of The Rock in the Sea (trans 1934) - the German original has
not been identified - discover unknown forms of life on a volcanic island
which has risen from the sea. [JC]

del PICCHIA, MENOTTI
[r] LATIN AMERICA.

DELRAY, CHESTER
Francis G. RAYER.

del REY, JUDY-LYNN
(1943-1986) US editor. She began her career in 1965 with GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION, becoming associate editor in 1969. Her predecessor was Lester DEL
REY; they married in 1971. She moved to BALLANTINE BOOKS in 1973, bringing
her husband in on the operation in 1974, and in 1977 was instrumental in
forming the Del Rey imprint - named for her - of Ballantine (itself owned
by Random House). As editor-in-chief of DEL REY BOOKS, she demonstrated an
extraordinary gift for marketing sf and fantasy to an unprecedentedly
large audience, and her releases often hit the US bestseller lists. At the
time of her death, she had become the dominant figure in US sf and fantasy
publishing. Given her physically taxing genetic disability - she was an
achondroplastic dwarf, and frequently in pain - the range of her
accomplishments in the driven world of New York publishing seemed all the
more remarkable.J-LDR was also responsible for the STELLAR original
anthology series: Stellar 1 (anth 1974), Stellar Short Novels (anth 1976),
Stellar Science-Fiction Stories #2 (anth 1976), #3 (anth 1977), #4 (anth
1978), #5 (anth 1980), #6 (anth 1981) and #7 (anth 1981). [JC]See also:
HUGO; PUBLISHING.

del REY, LESTER
Working name of US writer Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith
Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes (1915-1993). His
father was a poor sharecropper of part-Spanish extraction, and LDR's
education proceeded in fits and starts before dwindling away after two
years in college. After holding a variety of temporary jobs he began to
write in the late 1930s, his first published work being "The Faithful" for
ASF in 1938. This was rapidly followed by his classic ROBOT story, "Helen
O'Loy" (1938). Many of his early stories are remarkable for their
sentimentality, but the best was the unsentimental suspense story Nerves
(1942 ASF; exp 1956; rev 1976), about an accident in a NUCLEAR-POWER plant
and the struggle to avert a major catastrophe. He stepped up his output
after becoming a full-time professional writer in 1950, but this was
accompanied by a decline in average quality. He produced several juvenile
novels, some as Philip St John (a name he first used in 1939). He wrote
also as Erik van Lhin, John Alvarez, Marion Henry, Philip James, Charles
SATTERFIELD and Edson MCCANN (the last two pseudonyms being used on
collaborations with Frederik POHL, who also used Satterfield on some solo
stories). LDR's most notable works of the 1950s and 1960s were: Preferred
Risk (1955 with Pohl, writing together as McCann; reprinted 1980 as by
Pohl and LDR); the ultra-tough novel of COLONIZATION Police Your Planet
(1953 Science Fiction Adventures; cut 1956 as by Erik van Lhin; rev 1975
as by LDR and Erik van Lhin); and an early novel on the theme of
OVERPOPULATION, The Eleventh Commandment (1962); rev 1970). The second of
the short-lived "Galaxy Magabooks" ( GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS), The
Sky is Falling/Badge of Infamy (1963 dos), featured revised versions of
two magazine novellas: The Sky is Falling (1954 Beyond as "No More Stars"
with Pohl, writing together as Charles Satterfield; rev 1963 for the
Magabook; 1974 dos) and Badge of Infamy (1959 Satellite; rev 1963 for the
Magabook; 1973 dos). Some novels which appeared under his name in 1966-8
were actually written, from LDR's extensive outlines, by Paul W. FAIRMAN;
these include The Runaway Robot (1965), Rocket from Infinity (1966), The
Infinite Worlds of Maybe (1966), The Scheme of Things (1966), Tunnel
through Time (1966), Siege Perilous (1966; vt The Man without a Planet
1969) and Prisoners of Space (1968). His most recent solo novel was
Pstalemate (1971), about the predicament of a man who discovers that he
has PSI POWERS, in the knowledge that all psi-powered individuals go
insane. Weeping May Tarry (1978), as by LDR with Raymond F. JONES, is a
novel by Jones extrapolating the theme of LDR'S "For I Am a Jealous
People" (Star Short Novels anth 1954 ed Frederik Pohl).From the late
1940s, as well as doing a considerable amount of writing, LDR was actively
involved with various business and editorial projects. In the early 1950s
he was editor of FANTASY MAGAZINE, ROCKET STORIES (under the house name
Wade KAEMPFERT), SPACE SCIENCE FICTION and, for a time, SCIENCE FICTION
ADVENTURES, leaving all these positions after a dispute in 1953. He edited
an anthology of juvenile sf, The Year After Tomorrow (anth 1954) with
Cecile Matschat and Carl Carmer, and one of the many series of The Best
Science Fiction Stories of the Year - #1 (anth 1972), #2 (anth 1973), #3
(anth 1974), #4 (anth 1975) and #5 (anth 1976). He selected the GARLAND
Library of Science Fiction reprint series (45 vols, all 1975) and compiled
Fantastic Science Fiction Art (1975). After the death of P. Schuyler
MILLER in 1974 he took over ASF's book-review column (he had previously
written reviews for Rocket Stories under the pseudonym Kenneth Wright, and
had done occasional reviews for other magazines under his own name,
notably IF in 1968-73). His fourth wife, Judy-Lynn DEL REY (nee Benjamin),
was for some time on the staff of Gal and its companions - where he served
as features editor 1969-74 - and became sf editor for BALLANTINE BOOKS in
the mid-1970s; LDR joined the company in 1977, when it began issuing its
sf and fantasy lines under the imprint DEL REY BOOKS - named in honour of
her - and he continued to operate these lines alone after his wife's death
in 1986 until his retirement at the end of 1991. His history of sf, The
World of Science Fiction: 1926-1976 - The History of a Subculture (1979),
focuses narrowly on the US pulp tradition.LDR was a versatile but rather
erratic writer who never fulfilled his early promise. His best work
appears in the collections . . . And Some Were Human (coll 1948; with
"Nerves" cut, rev vt Tales of Soaring Science Fiction from . . . And Some
Were Human 1961) and Gods and Golems (coll 1973); much of this is
reprinted in The Best of Lester del Rey (coll 1978). There is an
interesting autobiographical commentary in The Early del Rey (coll 1975).
LDR was given the NEBULA Grand Master award for 1990. [BS]Other works:
Marooned on Mars (1952 juvenile); Rocket Jockey (1952 juvenile, as by
Philip St John; vt Rocket Pilot UK; reprinted 1978 as by LDR); Attack from
Atlantis (1953), a juvenile; Battle on Mercury (1953) as by Erik van Lhin,
a juvenile; the Moon sequence of juvenile tales, comprising Step to the
Stars (1954), Mission to the Moon (1956) and Moon of Mutiny (1961);
Rockets to Nowhere (1954) as by Philip St John, a juvenile; Robots and
Changelings (coll 1957); The Cave of Spears (1957); Day of the Giants
(1950 Fantastic Adventures as "When the World Tottered"; 1959); Outpost of
Jupiter (1963), a juvenile; Mortals and Monsters (coll 1965); The Best of
Hal Clement (coll 1979), ed; Once Upon a Time: A Collection of Modern
Fairy Tales (anth 1991) with Risa Kessler.About the author: "Lester del
Rey" in Seekers of Tomorrow (1967) by Sam MOSKOWITZ.See also: ALIENS;
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; ESP; EVOLUTION; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND
SPORTS; GOLDEN AGE OF SF; HUGO; MARS; MERCURY; MOON; MUTANTS; ORIGIN OF
MAN; PREDICTION; PUBLISHING; RELIGION; SATIRE; SOCIAL DARWINISM;
SPACESHIPS; VENUS.

DEL REY BOOKS
US paperback imprint, founded 1977, a subsidiary of BALLANTINE BOOKS,
itself a part of Random House. The imprint was named by then-Ballantine
editor Judy-Lynn DEL REY for her husband Lester DEL REY; the original
Ballantine imprint is now little used for sf. Judy-Lynn, who died in 1986,
was editor-in-chief and, from 1982, publisher; Lester, the very successful
fantasy editor, retired from the company in 1991 at the age of 76. DRB is
an sf/fantasy imprint, though it is in fantasy that it has had the
majority of its commercial successes, which have been very substantial.
Its fantasy authors, some of whom began their career with DRB, have
included Piers ANTHONY, James P. BLAYLOCK, Terry Brooks, Stephen
DONALDSON, David Eddings, Barbara HAMBLY and Katherine KURTZ. Its sf
authors have included Arthur C. CLARKE, Anne MCCAFFREY, Larry NIVEN,
Frederik POHL and Charles SHEFFIELD. DRB is an important sf/fantasy
publisher in terms of big-selling books; it has also published a number of
good books. The two categories overlap. [PN]

DELUGE
Film (1933). RKO. Dir Felix E. Feist, starring Sidney Blackmer, Peggy
Shannon, Lois Wilson. Screenplay John Goodrich, Warren B. Duff, based on
Deluge (1928) by S. Fowler WRIGHT. 70 mins. B/w.One of the first DISASTER
movies, this is an impressive spectacle showing the destruction of New
York by a series of earthquakes and tidal waves. There are good special
effects by Ned Mann, who later designed and supervised the effects in
THINGS TO COME (1936), but the survivors' melodramatic love story is
disappointing, and less shocking than the one in the book. The disaster
sequence was later used as stock footage, continuing to show up in other
films for decades. [JB/PN]

de MADARIAGA (Y ROJO), SALVADOR
[r] Salvador de MADARIAGA.

DeMARINIS, RICK
(1934- ) US writer whose first novel, A Lovely Monster: The Adventures of
Claude Rains and Dr Tellenbeck (1975), applies a sharply fabulistic eye (
FABULATION) to Southern California and to the FRANKENSTEIN myth. Scimitar
(1977), set in a similar region, satirically anatomizes the panicky
responses of an urban USA to the imploding NEAR FUTURE. Cinder (1978),
contrastingly, celebrates an old man's last days, which he spends (in
every sense) in the company of a genie, also ageing and also determined to
seize the day. The stories assembled in Jack & Jill (coll 1979) hover at
the edge of sf, as do some of the contents of both Under the Wheat (coll
1986) - notably the terrifying title story and "Weeds" - and The Coming
Triumph of the Free World (coll 1988). RDM's later novels, The Burning
Women of Far Cry (1986) and The Year of the Zinc Penny (1989), do not
venture into the fantastic. [JC]

DEMIJOHN, THOM
Collaborative pseudonym of Thomas M. DISCH and John T. SLADEK on the
first edition of their mystery novel (not sf) Black Alice (1968). The
subsequent edition used their real names.

De MILLE, JAMES
(1833-1880) Canadian writer and academic, author of much signed fiction
and an anonymous, posthumous, Antarctic UTOPIA, A Strange Manuscript Found
in a Copper Cylinder (1888), one of the best 19th-century lost-race ( LOST
WORLDS) novels. The cylinder's contents describe a shipwreck survivor's
discovery of a lost valley at the South Pole, where the climate is
temperate, prehistoric animals wander about, and a Semitic people, the
Kosekin, has evolved a kindly, cannibalistic society which values
darkness, poverty and clement death. [JC]See also: CANADA.

DEMOLITION MAN
Film (1993). Silver Pictures/Warner Bros. Dir. Marco Brambilla;
screenplay Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau, Peter M. Lenkov, based on a story
by Lenkov and Reneau; starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra
Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Bob Gunton and Denis Leary. 115 mins. Colour.In
1997 Los Angeles, macho cop John Spartan (Stallone)-nicknamed "the
demolition man"- is framed by his most recent arrestee, malicious
supercriminal Simon Phoenix (Snipes), for the inadvertent manslaughter of
a large group of hostages. Policeman and criminal are both sentenced to a
cryoprison where they are frozen, and their frozen brains, in theory at
least, are subjected to rehabilitation programs. About 35 years later an
obviously unrehabilitated Phoenix is woken up for a parole hearing,
escapes (through mysteriously knowing the code word that will unshackle
him), and commits a series of murders in the peaceful utopia that Los
Angeles, now San Angeles, has apparently become. Spartan is also brought
back to life, by the meek and spineless future police force that can't
cope with actual homicide. Spartan quickly discovers that Phoenix has been
deliberately released by Cocteau (Hawthorne), the much loved dictator of
this utopia, in order brutally to dispose of those rebels against the
peace-and-love regime who eke out a life in the sewers. Spartan triumphs,
and in so doing proves to be the mediator between the false tranquillity
of the "eloi" style utopia (see H.G. WELLS), and the all too human grunge
of the (rather handsome) morlocks.This is a strange blend of mildly
sophisticated comedy, mainly satire at the expense of Californian new-age
utopianism, and straightforward shoot-em-up action adventure. Screenwriter
Waters was previously responsible for the black comedy Heathers (1989),
and most of the often amusing if tasteless jokes (like a machine-mediated
orgasm sequence, one of many borrowings from SLEEPER, 1973) are presumably
his. But unlike The Last Action Hero, a Schwarzenegger action FANTASY also
made in 1993, this is no thoroughgoing deconstruction of the action movie,
despite Stallone taking to knitting. Indeed, the film is disappointing in
its refusal to take future utopian possibilities even remotely seriously,
and in its easy assumption, familiar in LIBERTARIAN philosophy, that any
attempt to channel or remove human violence will result in a doomed and
static civilisation. The film's moral is that social engineering must
always be evil, and it takes a tough cop to prove it. [PN]

DEMON
Film. GOD TOLD ME TO.

DEMONS
GODS AND DEMONS; MAGIC; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.

DEMON SEED
Film (1977). MGM. Dir Donald Cammell, starring Julie Christie, Fritz
Weaver, Gerrit Graham, Berry Kroeger. Screenplay Robert Jaffe, Roger O.
Hirson, based on Demon Seed (1973) by Dean R. KOONTZ. 95 mins. Colour.When
the supercomputer Proteus IV is switched on it refuses to obey
instructions, in the time-honoured tradition (for examples COLOSSUS, THE
FORBIN PROJECT; 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY). All its terminals are shut down
with the inadvertent exception of one, located in its creator's own
automated home, which also contains a primitive one-armed robot and the
scientist's estranged wife. The COMPUTER takes control of the house,
trapping the woman inside and subjecting her to a terrifying (and
calculatedly fetishistic) ordeal culminating in its raping her in order to
create a new super-race melding human and MACHINE. This up-to-date Luddite
variation of the FRANKENSTEIN theme, more HORROR than sf, can perhaps be
admired for its bravado in putting its tasteless subtext up there on the
surface where everyone can see it. There is indeed a baby. [JB/PN]See
also: PARANOIA.

DEMONS OF THE SWAMP
Roger CORMAN.

De MORGAN, JOHN
(1848-c1920) US writer of fantastic fiction, miscellaneous works and dime
novels; said to have been of UK birth. He drew very heavily on the work of
H. Rider HAGGARD for models and sources. His adult fantastic fiction
included: He (1887), involving a search for Kallikrates, an immortal who
lives on Easter Island; "It" (1887), with characters from King Solomon's
Mines (1886) like Allan Quatermain, describing further adventures in East
Africa seeking the immortal woman, culminating in the discovery of the
Missing Link and a clear statement about mutations; and King Solomon's
Treasures (1887), which invokes a surviving pterodactyl and the immortal
Macrobi. These works embodied an impressive background of accurate
classical and ethnographic data. King Solomon's Wives (1887) as by Hyder
Ragged, sometimes erroneously attributed to JDM, was written by UK legal
scholar Sir Henry Chartres Biron (1863-1940).JDM later became a staff
writer for Norman L. Munro ( DIME-NOVEL SF) and wrote conventional dime
novels. The Strange Adventures of Two New York Boys in the Realm of the
Polar North (1890) describes a lost race ( LOST WORLDS) of Old Norse near
the North Pole, while Into the Maelstrom (1894) is concerned with a
UTOPIAN society (without crime or evil passions) in a cave world filled
with breathable water under the Maelstrom. In Unknown Worlds (1896), In
Search of the Gold of Ophir (1899) and Bringing Home the Gold (1899) all
deal with Missing Links. [EFB]

DEMPSEY, HANK
[s] Harry HARRISON.

DENMARK
Although one cannot really speak of a Danish sf tradition prior to the
1950s, quite a few Danish authors did write occasional sf works before
then. The first such book was Ludvig HOLBERG's Nicolai Klimii iter
Subterraneum (1741 in Latin; trans as A Journey to the World Underground
by Nicolas Klimius 1742; reprinted 1974), which was among the earliest
works in any language to feature a journey inside a HOLLOW EARTH. The 18th
century saw a few other satirical and fantastical sf-like works, such as
the play Anno 7603 ["The Year 7603"] (1785), a gender-reversal SATIRE, by
Johan Hermann Wessel (1742-1785).The early 19th century saw little Danish
sf and fantasy, although Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), in addition
to his fantasies, wrote a few sf stories, most notably"Om
Aartusinder"(1853; trans as"In a Thousand Years" in The Hans Andersen
Library 1869). With the arrival of a new rationalism around 1870, the
ground was laid for renewed activity in sf, but not much was actually
published. A very interesting work from this time is Vilhelm Bergsoe's
novella "En reise med Flyvefisken 'Prometheus'" ["A Journey on the Flying
Fish 'Prometheus'"] (1869), which tells of a transatlantic journey on a
vessel which alternately flies above the water and dives beneath the
surface. Authors who worked with UTOPIAN themes included C.F. Sibbern with
Meddelelser af Indholdet af et skrift fra Aaret 2135 ["Report on the
Content of Papers from the Year 2135"] (2 vols, 1858 and 1872) and Otto
Moller with Guld og AEre ["Gold and Honour"] (1900).The early 20th century
saw a number of action-oriented juveniles, chiefly from Niels Meyn
(1891-1957), who wrote racist and imperialistic SPACE OPERAS in imitation
of Hans Dominik ( GERMANY) and various US authors. Satire and social
criticism, mostly of a conservative bent, were produced by other
contemporary authors, such as Aage Heinberg with Himmelstormerne ["Young
Titans"] (1919).After WWII and Hiroshima, Danish literature reflected a
mixture of fear and enthusiasm towards technology. This, together with the
growing US cultural and economic dominance, made for a new trend in Danish
sf. Chief among its practitioners was Niels E. Nielsen (1924- ), whose sf
debut was in 1952 and who has since written about 40 sf novels. He began
as an imitator of Ray BRADBURY, and still harbours a cautious attitude
towards TECHNOLOGY, his books usually warning against humankind's
usurpation of the powers of the Creator. Among his motifs are nuclear and
ecological catastrophe; as early as 1970 he wrote a novel about GENETIC
ENGINEERING, Herskerne ["The Rulers"] (1970).The 1960s saw increased
interest in sf as a result of two principal factors: one was the
enthusiasm generated by the US space programme, the other the
indefatigable Jannick Storm (1939- ), who, as editor and translator,
introduced a lot of US, UK and Scandinavian sf. Storm was a proponent of
the NEW WAVE but also introduced such "classical" writers as Isaac ASIMOV,
James BLISH and Frederik POHL.From the late 1960s onwards this increased
interest in the genre led to a number of Danish authors writing occasional
sf books. These may be grouped in several ways. Chiefly inspired by the
New Wave and COMICS, the "flower children" of the late 1960s saw sf as a
new way of telling wondrous tales, as with Knud Holten in Suma-X (1969).
The realists, on the other hand, saw in sf a continuation of realism by
other means and created NEAR-FUTURE scenarios; examples are Anders
BODELSEN's Frysepunktet (1969; trans as Freezing Point 1971; vt Freezing
Down) and Henrik STANGERUP's Manden der ville vaere skyldig (1973; trans
as The Man who Wanted to be Guilty 1982). Experimental modernists took
from the genre part of its inventory and used it for other purposes, as in
Liget og Lysten ["Corpse and Desire"] (1968) by Svendge Madsen, which
contains sf elements without really being sf. Occultists and ufologists
published a number of sf works, best among them being Erwin
Neutzsky-Wulff's Anno Domini (1975) and Gud ["God"] (1976). Finally,
politically conscious writers used near-future scenarios to debate
POLLUTION and NUCLEAR POWER. One author who has managed this without his
fiction suffering from the politics is Jorgen Lindgreen, whose Atomer pa
Naesset ["Nuclear Plant on the Promontory"] (1975) is an effective
TECHNOTHRILLER. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a rather disparate group
of WOMEN SF WRITERS appeared, ranging from the modernist Dorrit Willumsen,
with Programmeret ti kaerlighed ["Programmed for Love"] (1981), to the
utopianist Vibeke Gronfeldt, with Det fantastike barn ["The Fantastic
Child"] (1982).With two exceptions, the authors mentioned above do not
consider themselves sf writers, and nor has any of them written more than
a single recognizably sf work. Those exceptions - the writers who really
know sf - are Bodelsen and Madsen: Bodelsen has published a number of sf
short stories, and Madsen has developed his own unique kind of sf with
such works as Tugt og utugt i mellemtiden ["Virtue and Depravity in the
Middle Period"] (1976), Se dagens lys ["Face the Light of Dawn"] (1980)
and Lad tiden ga ["Let Time Flow"] (1985). Later, Inge Eriksen joined them
with a very ambitious tetralogy, Rummet uden tid ["Space without Time"]
(1983-9). If a distinctly Danish sf is to develop, it will have to build
upon the works of these three. [ND]

DENMARK, HARRISON
[s] Roger ZELAZNY.

DENNIS, BRUCE
[s] David Wright O'BRIEN.

DENNIS, GEOFFREY (POMEROY)
(1892-1963) UK writer whose Harvest in Poland (1925; rev 1931) deals with
augurs of a grim future for Europe in supernatural terms. The End of the
World (1930), despite its sf title, is a nonfiction discourse on the ways
in which the world might in fact end. It has been suggested by Brian M.
STABLEFORD that GD may have also written under the name Guy DENT. [JC]

DENNIS, NIGEL (FORBES)
(1912-1989) UK writer whose second novel, Cards of Identity (1955), is a
FABULATION about a post-WWII England whose citizens are so bereft of
security that any identity can be imposed on anyone (see also PARANOIA);
the final section, entitled "The Prince of Antioch, or An Old Way to New
Identity", constitutes an entire (and entirely fraudulent) Shakespeare
play, hilariously couched. In A House in Order (1966) identity is again
imperilled as the protagonist, under increasingly surreal assault,
attempts to act as though WWIII were not happening around him. [JC]

DENT, GUY
(? - ) Pseudonymous UK writer whose one original contribution to sf,
Emperor of the If (1926), describes two of the possible universes created
by a disembodied brain in a laboratory. In the first part the past is
superimposed on the present, with vivid descriptions of London being
overrun by prehistoric flora and fauna; in the second the locale is a
future DYSTOPIA where humans exist under the domination of
self-reproducing MACHINES. It has been suggested by Brian M. STABLEFORD
that GD was in fact Geoffrey DENNIS. [JE]See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS;
EVOLUTION; FAR FUTURE; SUPERMAN.

DENT, LESTER
(1905-1959) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with
"Pirate Cay" for Top Notch Magazine in 1929; best known for his Doc Savage
novels, which he wrote for DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE under the house name
Kenneth ROBESON (which see for details); LD wrote all but 43 of the 181
issues. He also wrote stories under his own name and other crime stories
under the pseudonym Tim Ryan. Lester Dent, the Man Behind Doc Savage
(1974) is a study by Robert E. WEINBERG; information about LD and about
his work appears also in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) by Philip
Jose FARMER. The most complete study is Bigger than Life: The Creator of
Doc Savage (1990) by Marilyn Cannaday. LD was famous in PULP-MAGAZINE
circles for his Master Plot: the action-suspense formula he claimed never
failed. His prose was described by James STERANKO as "bravura frenzy".
[PN/JC]

DENTINGER, STEPHEN
[s] Edward D. HOCH.

DENTON, BRADLEY (CLAYTON)
(1958- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Music of the Spheres" in
FSF in 1984, and who caused some impact in the field with his first novel,
Wrack and Roll (1986), a contemporary ALTERNATE-WORLD tale which portrays
heavy-metal musicians as the HEROES they might dream of being in a world
absolutely divided between the "straight" majority and the
anti-authoritarian "wrackers", who are defined by their MUSIC. BD displays
an impressive feel for the sustaining myths of heavy metal in his
depiction of the wrackers, whose random violence and passion for life are
set against the sterility and genocidal tendencies of the straight world
as nuclear war approaches. BUDDY HOLLY IS ALIVE AND WELL ON GANYMEDE
(1991) deploys the same range of knowledge with more feeling, deeper
nostalgia, and an improved control of narrative; and Blackburn (1993), a
horror novel featuring a serial killer with whom it is possible to
empathize (though not to defend), is a maturely controlled fable of
America. BD's short stories are generally contemporary fantasies with a
moral twist, like the 1988 title story of The Calvin Coolidge Home for
Dead Comedians(coll 1994) in 2 vols, a fable which attacks the sterile
blindness of many Christian conceptions of heaven. [NT]

de PEDROLO, MANUEL
[r] SPAIN.

De POLNAY, PETER
(1906-1984) Hungarian-born writer, in the UK from before WWII. Of his
very many novels, only The Stuffed Dog (1977), a TIME-TRAVEL tale, is of
genre interest. [JC]

De REYNA, JORGE
Diane DETZER.

DERLETH, AUGUST W(ILLIAM)
(1909-1971) US writer and editor, born in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he
spent his life. A correspondent with and devout admirer of H.P. LOVECRAFT,
he devoted much of his life to projects aimed at preserving Lovecraft's
memory. The most important of these projects was of course the founding,
with Donald WANDREI, of the publishing company ARKHAM HOUSE in Sauk City
in order to publish Lovecraft's stories; Wandrei later resigned his
interest, but AWD carried on until his death, publishing a wide range of
weird fiction, including some of his own otherwise very widely published
work. He completed a number of unfinished Lovecraft stories and fragments:
The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), The Survivor and Others (coll 1957)
and The Watchers Out of Time and Others (coll 1974). In addition, he wrote
two volumes of Lovecraft pastiches, The Mask of Cthulhu (coll 1958) and
The Trail of Cthulhu (coll 1962), and edited anthologies of such stories
by various writers like The Shuttered Room, and Other Pieces (anth 1959) -
a title not to be confused with either of the Lovecraft collections
likewise entitled (one 1970 UK and one 1971 US, contents differing) -
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (anth 1969; vt in 2 vols as Tales of the
Cthulhu Mythos #1 1971 and #2) 1971). AWD edited Lovecraft's writings for
publication, including his letters (in collaboration with Wandrei) and The
Dark Brotherhood, and Other Pieces (anth 1966) - a coll of Lovecraft
stories, solo and in collaboration - and also wrote H.P.L.: A Memoir
(1945) and Some Notes on H.P. Lovecraft (1959 chap).But AWD's literary
activities were by no means dominated by his interest in Lovecraft. He was
a prolific and successful writer of regional novels, receiving a
Guggenheim Fellowship for this work, and of detective fiction, starting
with Murder Stalks the Wakely Family (1934; vt Death Stalks the Wakely
Family 1937 UK); he published a series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches about
the character Solar Pons, beginning with "In Re: Sherlock Holmes" - The
Adventures of Solar Pons (coll 1945; vt Regarding Sherlock Holmes 1974; vt
The Adventures of Solar Pons 1975 UK). His very first story, however -
"Bat's Belfry" for Weird Tales in 1926 - was of genre interest, and he
remained for many years a prolific contributor to WEIRD TALES, mainly
under his own name and the pseudonym Stephen Grendon, and to other
magazines, including STRANGE STORIES (where he used the name Tally Mason).
His best work was assembled in Someone in the Dark (coll 1941), Something
Near (coll 1945), Not Long for This World (coll 1948; with 11 stories cut,
vt Tales from Not Long for This World 1961), Lonesome Places (coll 1962),
Mr George and Other Odd Persons (coll 1963 as Stephen Grendon; 1964 as
AWD; vt When Graveyards Yawn 1965 UK as AWD), Colonel Markesan and Less
Pleasant People (coll 1966) with the US critic and writer Mark Schorer
(1908-1977), and Dwellers in Darkness (coll 1976). He wrote little sf, but
his Tex Harrigan series was about a newspaperman constantly running across
zany sf inventions and the like; it was included in Harrigan's File (coll
1975).AWD edited a great many anthologies, both sf and weird. His sf
anthologies include several large volumes: Strange Ports of Call (anth
1948; much cut 1958), The Other Side of the Moon (anth 1949; cut 1956 UK;
much cut 1959 US) and Beyond Time and Space (anth 1950; much cut 1958).
His weird anthologies include Sleep No More (anth 1944; cut 1964 UK; much
cut vt Stories From Sleep No More 1967 US), Who Knocks? (anth 1946; much
cut 1964 UK) and The Sleeping & the Dead (anth 1947; vt in 2 vols as The
Sleeping and the Dead 1964 UK and The Unquiet Grave 1964 UK). AWD was one
of the pioneering anthologists in the genre.The history of Arkham House
was chronicled in AWD's Arkham House: The First 20 Years (1959 chap) and
Thirty Years of Arkham House, 1939-1969: A History and Bibliography (1970
chap). In 1948-9 the company published a magazine, ARKHAM SAMPLER, ed AWD.
Competent and literate and highly energetic, AWD was the central figure in
bringing lasting popularity to Lovecraft and to other authors such as
Clark Ashton SMITH. His own extremely various output awaits comprehensive
appraisal. [MJE]Other works: 100 Books by August Derleth (1962),
nonfiction; The Beast in Holger's Woods (1968).As Editor: The Night Side
(anth 1947); Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre (anth
1947); Far Boundaries (anth 1951; cut 1967); The Outer Reaches (anth 1951;
cut 1958; vt in 2 vols as The Outer Reaches 1963 UK and The Time of
Infinity 1963 UK); Night's Yawning Peal (anth 1952; much cut 1974);
Beachheads in Space (anth 1952; cut 1954 UK; cut 1957 US; with 1 story
cut, vt in 2 vols as Beachheads in Space 1964 UK and From Other Worlds
1964 UK); Worlds of Tomorrow (anth 1953; cut 1954 UK; cut 1958 US; vt in 2
vols as Worlds of Tomorrow 1963 UK and New Worlds for Old 1963 UK); Time
to Come (anth 1954; cut 1959); Portals of Tomorrow (anth 1954); Fire and
Sleet and Candlelight (anth 1961), poetry; Dark Mind, Dark Heart (anth
1962); When Evil Wakes (anth 1963 UK); Over the Edge (anth 1964);
Travelers by Night (anth 1967); Dark Things (anth 1971).About the author:
August Derleth: A Bibliography (1983) by Alison M. Wilson.See also:
PUBLISHING; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.

DERNIER COMBAT, LE
(vt The Last Battle) Film (1983). Films du Loup. Dir Luc Besson, starring
Pierre Jolivet, Jean Bouise, Jean Reno. Screenplay Besson, Jolivet. 92
mins. B/w.Made by Besson (later one of the best-known French directors of
his generation) when only 23, the arty but vigorous LDC is low-budget and
photographed in black-and-white Cinemascope, and has no dialogue at all. A
young man (Jolivet) in an unspeaking post- HOLOCAUST world - holocaust and
speechlessness remain unexplained - flies in a restored plane, meets an
old doctor, matures, fights a swordsman, conquers a tribal leader and gets
a girl. A dwarf lives in a locked car trunk; the tops of high-rise
buildings project from the sand; fish fall from the sky; Samurai lurch and
scuttle; women are imprisoned. [PN]

De ROUEN, REED R(ANDOLPH)
(1917-1986) US writer of half Native American (Oneida) extraction. His sf
novel Split Image (1955 UK) mixes SPACE OPERA and speculation on POLITICS
and RELIGION in its story of a space flight culminating in a landing on an
exact duplicate of Earth. [PN/JC]

DESART, THE EARL OF
Working name of UK writer W.U.O'C. Cuffe (1845-1898), whose The Raid of
the "Detrimental" (1897) describes a LOST WORLD in the South Atlantic
transformed by its UK inhabitants into an advanced UTOPIA. [JC]

DESMOND, SHAW
(1877-1960) Irish novelist, poet, founder of the International Institute
for Psychical Research (1934), and author of many works on the afterlife
and several sf novels. Democracy (1919) predicts a revolution in the UK.
The DYSTOPIAN Ragnarok (1926) envisages the destruction of civilization
through a world WAR fought by armies equipped with radio-controlled planes
and poisonous gases, the narrative concentrating on the derring-do of
futuristic fighter pilots. His pessimism continued in Chaos (1938), which
prophesies a future war between the UK and Germany. World-Birth (1938),
possibly stimulated by the works of Olaf STAPLEDON, describes the troubled
future history of mankind and the eventual development of an ideal state.
This concluding optimism surfaces again in Black Dawn (1944), where world
peace is the dream. His earlier works include two fantasies: Echo (1927)
is a memory of past incarnation ( REINCARNATION) and Gods (1921) centres
on industrial exploitation. Tales of the Little Sisters Of Saint Francis
(coll 1929) includes some fantasy. [JE]See also: WEAPONS.

DESTINATION MOON
Up until the 1950s, science fiction films were few and far between.
Destination Moon changed all that. Based on Robert Heinlein's successful
book, Rocket Ship Galileo, Destination Moon started a major sci-fi movie
boom.But unlike many of the creature features that followed, this film was
relatively accurate. This was probably because the screenplay was written
by Heinlein himself, and he and German rocket expert Hermann Oberth were
technical advisors.The only thing that the team got wrong was not a
scientific error. In the screenplay for Destination Moon, the moon project
was paid for by private enterprise. Taxpayer dollars for space programs
was a thing of the future.

DESTINATION MOON
Film (1950). A George Pal Production/Eagle-Lion. Dir Irving Pichel,
starring John Archer, Warner Anderson, Dick Wesson, Tom Powers. Screenplay
Robert A. HEINLEIN, "Rip" Van Ronkel, James O'Hanlon, based loosely on
Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) by Heinlein. 92 mins. Colour.DM, the first of
George PAL's many sf productions, has great historical importance: its
commercial success initiated the sf film boom of the 1950s after a decade
that had contained almost no sf CINEMA at all. It has interest in
hindsight, too, in the partial accuracy with which it anticipated the
actual Moon landing of 1969. To this day, DM stands as a film obviously
made by people who knew about science: along with the German rocket expert
Hermann Oberth (1894-1989), Heinlein himself acted as technical advisor.
The special effects are relatively convincing: astronomical artist Chesley
BONESTELL provided the backgrounds for the scenes on the Moon, working
with art director Ernst Fegte. The film's biggest predictive error was
political, not scientific: it predicted that the first Moon landing,
described as "the greatest challenge ever hurled at American industry",
would be a truly capitalist affair conducted by private enterprise. DM is
an austere film, semidocumentary in nature and, aside from a sequence
about fuel shortage near the end, rather placid and unexciting. But,
despite its colourless script and its low-key performances (except for
some ill judged comic relief from the blue-collar radio operator, played
by Wesson), DM is a film with considerable dignity and, in a quiet way, a
genuine SENSE OF WONDER. Its final message - THIS IS THE END OF THE
BEGINNING in big block letters - can be seen, in retrospect, as an
entirely justified claim. [PN]See also: MOON; ROCKETS; SPACE FLIGHT.

DESTINATION MOONBASE-ALPHA
SPACE 1999.

DESTINATION SATURN
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY.

DESTINIES
US "magazine" in paperback-book format published by ACE BOOKS, ed James
BAEN, 11 issues, Nov 1978-Aug 1981, last issue undated. The list of
contributors to all sections of the magazine - which could equally be
thought of as an original- ANTHOLOGY series - was impressive. Book reviews
were by Spider ROBINSON, with Orson Scott CARD and Norman SPINRAD taking
over from #6. Science-fact articles came from Jerry POURNELLE, among
others, and included a five-part series by Poul ANDERSON on the
interaction between sf and science. The fiction was mainly short stories
and novelettes, many from well known authors like Gregory BENFORD, Card,
Larry NIVEN (with Pournelle), Clifford D. SIMAK and Roger ZELAZNY. "Lost
Dorsai" by Gordon R. DICKSON won the 1981 HUGO for Best Novella. The
emphasis was on HARD SF. The series died when Baen left Ace. However, some
time after Baen formed his publishing company Baen Books in 1983, and
having published a very similar paperback magazine series, FAR FRONTIERS
(1985-6), he resuscitated Destinies as New Destinies, beginning with New
Destinies, Vol I: Spring 1987 ed Baen, apparently current (1992) though
irregular, with 8 issues up to New Destinies Vol IX (anth 1990); there was
no New Destinies Vol V. The mixture was, as before, of scientific articles
and hard-sf stories by authors like Dean ING, Spider Robinson, Charles
SHEFFIELD and Harry TURTLEDOVE, as well as pieces from several of the
contributors to the original Destinies. [RR/PN]

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS
GOJIRA; RADON.

DESTROY ALL PLANETS
DAIKAIJU GAMERA.

De TARDE, JEAN GABRIEL
[r] Gabriel TARDE.

DETECTIVES
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

De TIMMS, GRAEME
A probable pseudonym. GDT's pulp-style paperback sf novels are Three
Quarters (1963) and Split (1963). [JC]

DETZER, DIANE
Working name used by US writer Diane Detzer de Reyna (1930- ) for some of
her sf, though she has also published much material as Adam Lukens, and
some as Jorge de Reyna. She began publishing sf with "The Tomb" for
Science Fiction Stories in 1958, and soon released a number of novels,
from The Sea People (1959) to Eevalu (1963), as Adam Lukens. These are
varied in subject matter but are generally routine SPACE OPERA. As Jorge
de Reyna she published The Return of the Starships (1968), and under her
own name The Planet of Fear (1968). [JC]Other works as Adam Lukens:
Conquest of Life (1960); Sons of the Wolf (1961); The Glass Cage (1962);
The World Within (1962); Alien World (1963).

DEVER, JOE
[r] Paul BARNETT; GAMES AND TOYS.

DEVEREUX, EVE
Paul BARNETT.

De VET, CHARLES V(INCENT)
(1911- ) US writer, mostly of short stories, of which he has written over
50 for sf magazines, beginning with "The Unexpected Weapon" for AMZ in
1950. In his first sf novel, Cosmic Checkmate (1958 ASF as "The Second
Game"; exp 1962 chap dos; exp vt Second Game 1981) with Katherine MACLEAN,
an Earthman is sent to investigate a hostile planet whose inhabitants'
social advancement depends on proficiency at the national chess-like game
( GAMES AND SPORTS). His second novel, Special Feature (1958 ASF; exp
1975), rather flatly depicts media involvement in the filming of the
depredations of an ALIEN monster in St Louis. After some years of silence,
CVDV became active once again in the late 1980s. [JC]

DEVIL-DOLL, THE
Film (1936). MGM. Dir Tod Browning, starring Lionel Barrymore, Maureen
O'Sullivan, Frank Lawton. Screenplay Browning, Garrett Fort, S. Guy
ENDORE, Erich von Stroheim, based on Burn, Witch, Burn! (1933) by A.
MERRITT and "The Witch of Timbuctoo" by Browning. 79 mins. B/w.In this
film by the director of Dracula (1931) and Freaks (1932) a man (Barrymore)
wrongly convicted and sent to Devil's Island returns to Paris, where he
uses miniaturized people for revenge. He disguises himself as an old-lady
toymaker and sends his 6in (15cm) humans as toys to the homes of his
enemies; in the middle of the night the "toys" come to life and carry out
his telepathic instructions. The illusion of miniaturization is perfectly
created by the use of giant sets and skilfully executed travelling mattes
- the work of the MGM special-effects department, then headed by A. Arnold
Gillespie. Though the original novel used alchemy for miniaturization,
this uses a supposedly scientific electrical device. [JB/PN]

DEVLIN, ROY P.
[s] Thomas P. KELLEY.

DEVOLUTION
Sf is usually an optimistic genre, and stories of EVOLUTION on the whole
envisage humanity as slowly progressing to higher states. However, a
persistent pessimistic note in GENRE SF generally, and to a degree in
mainstream sf too, has been to imagine the opposite, the devolution or
degeneration of mankind. The note was sounded most famously in H.G.
WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), in which humankind evolves into two
races, one physically degenerate, the other with few mental resources. At
the end of the book humankind is gone, the Sun is cooling, and a solitary
football-shaped creature is seen flopping in the last shallow sea. In
George Allan ENGLAND's Darkness and Dawn (1914) a couple wake after
SUSPENDED ANIMATION to find a desolate Earth peopled by subhuman
descendants of the survivors of a natural DISASTER. The rhetoric is lurid.
To this day, stories of the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER are often peopled by
tribal savages and monstrous MUTANTS, though here the devolution tends to
be social rather than biological in emphasis, as in Russell HOBAN's
RIDDLEY WALKER (1980), which is unusual in its foregrounding of a devolved
(but vivid) language ( LINGUISTICS). The possibility of biological
devolution was mooted in pseudo-scientific circles a good deal in the
early part of the century - it was a favourite notion of the Nazis - and
H.P. LOVECRAFT often saw the adherents of his various disgusting cults as
devolved into froglike or apelike creatures. The idea that humanity could
revert to apedom was almost a CLICHE of pulp sf; it is central to, for
example, The Iron Star (1930) by John TAINE, in which rays from a meteor
are the mutagenic agent. La planete des singes (1963; trans as Planet of
the Apes 1963 US; vt Monkey Planet 1964 UK) by Pierre BOULLE, filmed as
PLANET OF THE APES (1968), put a later slant on the theme for satirical
purposes by having the evolution of apes paralleled by the devolution of
humans. The hero of Edmond HAMILTON's "The Man who Evolved" (1931)
regresses finally to a blob. Hamilton enjoyed the cosmic pointlessness
suggested by ideas of devolution, and often used the theme. On a more
serious level, the idea comes up several times in LAST AND FIRST MEN
(1930) by Olaf STAPLEDON, in which the upwards progression of the
evolutionary thrust is several times interrupted by devolutionary
sequences, rather like someone climbing a slippery hill and occasionally
backsliding.Paddy CHAYEFSKY's Altered States (1978) gives a new twist to
the idea in its interesting if absurd notion that altered states of
consciousness (as in a sensory-deprivation tank) may lead to instant
alteration of the way our genetic heritage is manifest, our oldest DNA
finding bodily expression to produce, in this case, first an apeman and
later a blob. This was filmed as ALTERED STATES (1980). Chayefsky admits
that his inspiration was Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a novel whose protagonist, after experimenting
with chemicals, alternates between two states: the highly evolved doctor
and the amoral, bestial Hyde. In Stevenson's book what is a subtext in
most earlier devolution stories is almost overt: that devolution is a
metaphorical equivalent of the Fall of Man.Social devolution was always a
popular theme in genre sf, partly because it gave writers a chance to
exploit colourful primitive societies and partly in deference to the
cyclic view of HISTORY popularized by Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975). The
theme is also common in stories of GALACTIC EMPIRES, where commonly a
social breakdown at the centre leads to cultural devolution on the
fringes, much as in the Roman Empire. This is the theme of Isaac ASIMOV's
Foundation trilogy.The theme of ENTROPY became popular in the 1960s, and
with it came a new lease of life for devolution stories. Evolution ever
upwards is an example of negentropy, or reverse entropy, and is counter to
the general running-down of the cosmos, which in obedience to the laws of
thermodynamics moves towards ever decreasing order, ever increasing
randomness. (The pessimism of the 1950s and 1960s probably had more to do
with the Vietnam War and problems of OVERPOPULATION and starvation than
with any revelation from physics, but entropy provided a convenient
metaphor for all this.) 1960s writers often envisaged increasing disorder
in terms of biological devolution. The theme was touched on by Samuel R.
DELANY in The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), but an earlier and more substantial
work was The Long Afternoon of Earth (1962 US; exp vt Hothouse 1962 UK) by
Brian W. ALDISS, in which a devolved and jungle-like Earth, whose shrunken
humans have taken to the trees again, is given a kind of weird charm; life
continues fecund even while INTELLIGENCE is lost and the Galaxy subsides
towards its heat-death.Devolution occurs in the work of other writers of
FABULATIONS and NEW-WAVE sf, and nowhere are its attractions for the
overintellectualized 20th century more clearly shown than in the works of
J.G. BALLARD, whose most central and recurring theme this is. Its first
clear expression was in his story "The Voices of Time" (1960), in which
the countdown to the end of the Universe is accompanied by a series of
baroque degenerate mutations and the hero's need for more and more sleep.
The tone is as much celebratory as tragic. Ballard's The Drowned World
(1962) has a hero ever more ready to slough off such human qualities as
ambition or even self-preservation as he listens to the insistent call of
his bloodstream, whose saltiness recalls a time before life had left the
oceans. These inner changes are mirrored in the Earth itself, which has
catastrophically reverted to the luxuriance of a new Carboniferous
era.Tales of devolution from the 1970s and 1980s are often curiously close
in feeling to their apparent opposite: the stories of evolutionary
transcendence that we associate with, for example, Greg BEAR and Ian
WATSON. Where we envisage an upwards there must necessarily be a
downwards, too; this is an idea that has haunted many sf writers, notably
Michael BISHOP, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally. It is
close to the latter in his NO ENEMY BUT TIME (1982), in which a modern man
travels back in time to find marriage and a home with hominids. Which
evolutionary direction is upwards, which downwards, and which better,
seems to several contemporary writers to be all a matter of perspective,
as can be seen in the main 1980s variant on the theme: a devolution that
is deliberately biologically (or psychologically) engineered. Several of
the CYBERPUNK writers have envisaged such an operation as a means of
simplifying the self to a creature who is less prone, perhaps, to the
angst induced by information overload. A similar idea is found in David
ZINDELL's Neverness (1988), a large part of which deals with the fierce,
brave, ice-age Alaloi, a race which "because they wanted to live what they
thought of as a natural life . . . back mutated some of their chromosomes,
the better to grow strong, primitive children to live on the pristine
worlds they hoped to discover". An interesting and even more ferocious
devolution, more psychic than physical, is that envisaged in Robert P.
HOLDSTOCK's Mythago Wood (1984) and its sequels, in which the human
hind-brain conspires with the power of an ancient woodland to strip the
minds of those who walk there down to the blood and bone of their
Neolithic forebears and further, back into the days of ice. Most writers
of the last few decades who have like Holdstock dealt with this theme have
exhibited a strong if ambiguous attraction to the idea, though to an
earlier generation devolution appeared straightforwardly repugnant.The
class of stories in which primitive primates confront evolved primates in
the present day is discussed under APES AND CAVEMEN; these stories, too,
have a bearing on the devolution theme. [PN]

DEWDNEY, A(LEXANDER) K(EEWATIN)
(1941- ) Canadian writer whose sf novel, The Planiverse: ComputerContact
with a Two-Dimensional World (1984 US), intriguingly updatesEdwin A.
ABBOTT's Flatland(1884); its flatland protagonist, Yndrd,attempts to
penetrate from his world of Arde into anepiphanous "reality beyond
reality,"making contact as he does with a roundworld COMPUTER programmed
to simulate2-dimensional existence. The portrayal of 2-dimensional life
provided by AKD is remarkablysustained, and is an education in the
understanding of mathematics. [JC]

DeWEESE, GENE
Working name of US technical writer and author Thomas Eugene DeWeese
(1934- ), who began writing sf with two Man from U.N.C.L.E. ties, The
Invisibility Affair * (1967) and The Mind-Twisters Affair * (1967), both
with Robert COULSON and signed, collaboratively, Thomas Stratton. Other
novels with Coulson, both authors now signing their own names, include a
routine sf adventure for LASER BOOKS, Gates of the Universe (1975 Canada;
rev vt Nightmare Universe 1985 US) and two spoof RECURSIVE novels about
reporter Joe Karns, who gets into all kinds of trouble at sf CONVENTIONS;
the large number of in-group references made it unlikely that either Now
You See It/Him/Them (1975) and Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats (1977)
would gain many readers outside the genre. In the 1980s, GDW concentrated
on lively juveniles (see listing below) and on several equally lively Star
Trek ties: for STAR TREK itself, Chain of Attack * (1987), its direct
sequel The Final Nexus * (1988), and Renegade * (1991); and, for STAR
TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, The Peacekeepers * (1988). [JC/PN]Other works:
Jeremy Case (1976 Canada); The Wanting Factor (1980); Something Answered
(1983).For children: Major Corby and the Unidentified Flapping Object
(1979); Nightmares from Space (1981); The Adventures of a Two-Minute
Werewolf (1983); the Calvin Willeford sequence, comprising Black Suits
from Outer Space (1985; vt Beepers from Outer Space 1985), The Dandelion
Caper (1986) and The Calvin Nullifier (1987); Whatever Became of Aunt
Margaret? (1990).As Jean DeWeese: Various Gothics, of which The Reimann
Curse (1975; vt A Different Darkness 1982 as GDW), The Moonstone Spirit
(1975), The Carnelian Cat (1975) and Nightmare in Pewter (1978) have been
registered as containing material of genre interest.

DeWEESE, JEAN
Gene DEWEESE.

De WREDER, PAUL
John HEMING.

DEXTER, J.B.
John S. GLASBY.

DEXTER, WILLIAM
Pseudonym of UK writer William Thomas Pritchard (1909- ), whose two sf
novels make up a short series. In World of Eclipse (1954) humans return
from internment on the planet of the Vulcanids to repopulate a devastated
Earth; Children of the Void (1955) brings in a runaway world, nuclear
conflicts in space, and communication with ethereal descendants of
humanity. [JC]

DEY, FREDERICK VAN RENSSELAER
[r] Nick CARTER; DIME-NOVEL SF; " NONAME".

DIABOLICAL DR MABUSE, THE
Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE .

DIABOLIC INVENTION, THE
VYNALEZ ZKAZY.

DIABOLIK
(vt Danger: Diabolik) Film (1967). Dino De Laurentiis/Marianne. Dir Mario
Bava, starring John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi,
Terry-Thomas. Screenplay Bava, Dino Maiuri, Adriano Baracco, Brian Degas,
Tudor Gates, based on fumetti by Luciana and Angela Giussani. 105 mins,
cut to 88 mins. Colour.This Italian/French coproduction is one of Di
Laurentiis's several attempts to film sf COMIC strips, others being
BARBARELLA (1967) and FLASH GORDON (1980). Law plays a stylish
supercriminal, after the style of Fantomas, the fictional antihero of
several thrillers, beginning with Fantomas (1913-14); he attempts to steal
the entire gold reserves and destroy all the tax records of his country.
He is caught at the denouement in a shower of radiactive molten gold,
becoming his own memorial. Directed with visual panache and a sense of fun
by Bava, D is futuristic but only marginally sf. [PN]

DIAMOND, JOHN
[s] Barrington J. BAYLEY.

DIANETICS
According to its adherents a science, according to its disbelievers a
PSEUDO-SCIENCE, founded by L. Ron HUBBARD, at the time a pulp writer whose
main market was the sf magazines. Hubbard's sf had always emphasized the
powers of the mind and deployed protagonists who maintained to the end a
heroic stance against a corrupt Universe. The former interest was
translated into real-life terms in the late 1940s, and the latter vision
may be what sustained Hubbard against the widespread execration he and his
movement received from some quarters, both outside and inside sf.The
editor of ASF, John W. CAMPBELL Jr, began experimenting with Hubbard's
ideas in 1949 and believed them valid. In May 1950 ASF (after much prior
publicity) published a long article on Dianetics, seen as a form of
psychotherapy that could achieve miraculous results in sweeping away the
dross that encumbers ordinary minds, to leave uncovered the SUPERMAN
latent in us all. Follow-up publicity went well beyond the sf magazines.
Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950) was
published in the same year, and immediately became a bestseller. The
attractions of Dianetics were manifold: it could be practised after mere
hours of training, with no formal education necessary; it proposed an
apparently simple and coherent model of the mind; it offered an
explanation of why so many people feel themselves to be unappreciated
failures - and, better than that, it offered a cure.In Dianetics an
"auditor" (the therapist) encourages the patient to babble out his/her
fantasies. The E-meter, a form of lie-detector, early on came to be an
essential item of equipment. In theory, the needle on the meter swings
over whenever a traumatic area of memory is uncovered, and the auditor
then disposes of the trauma by revealing its meaning. So far, this is
rather like an sf version of conventional psychoanalysis. However, Hubbard
also taught that traumas could be pre-natal, and eventually that they
could have been suffered during previous incarnations ( REINCARNATION)
right back to the dawn of time. A "clear" - a person who had successfully
rid himself/herself of aberrations - would possess radically increased
intelligence, powers of telepathy, the ability to move outside the body
and to control such somatic processes as growing new teeth, and a
photographic memory. Here was the superman figure of so much contemporary
pulp sf made flesh - at least if Dianetics worked ( EDISONADE).Film stars
took up Dianetics; centres were opened all over the USA; many thousands
were converted, including A.E. VAN VOGT, whose own sf had produced many
protagonists not unlike Dianetics's "clears". One of Hubbard's assistants
was Perry CHAPDELAINE, who later became an sf writer himself. In 1952,
after an organizational rift, Hubbard left the Dianetic Foundation and
soon advertised his new advance on Dianetics, SCIENTOLOGY, in the entry
for which this story is continued. [PN]See also: PARANOIA.

DIBELL, ANSEN
Pseudonym of US writer Ann Dibble (1942- ) whose sf sequence, the Strange
and Fantastic History of the King of Kantmorie, comprises 3 PLANETARY
ROMANCE tales-Pursuit of the Screamer (1978), Circle, Crescent, Star
(1981) and Summerfair (1982)-set in a world inhabited by GENETICALLY
ENGINEERED races in exile from a forgotten galactic civilization, along
with a dying group of CLONES; and intimately affected by an organic
COMPUTER named Shai which (or who) eventually offers the protagonist the
opportunity of space flight. The outcome of the sequence is unclear, as is
its ultimate success as a work of art; the release of its 2 final volumes,
Tidestorm Limit and The Sun of Return, might resolve these issues, and
help establish the Fantastic History as a significant contribution to the
genre. [JC]

DICK, KAY
(1915- ) UK writer and editor whose novel, They: A Sequence of Unease
(1977), resembles thematically and in its experimental structure much of
her previous fiction, but is set in a NEAR-FUTURE England where freedom of
travel is restricted and cultural activities are actively persecuted.
Constructed as a set of linked stories that mirror one another, They
relates ENTROPY and the youth-culture as enemies of creative values (and
middle-class individualism); in relating these levels of meaning, KD sets
up a very moving, though abstract, model of humanistic response to a
straitened future. [JC]Other works as editor: The Mandrake Root (anth
1946) as Jeremy Scott, At Close of Eve (anth 1947) as Scott and The
Uncertain Element (anth 1950), all fantasy anthologies.

DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED)
(1928-1982) US writer, one of the two or three most important figures in
20th-century US sf and an author of general significance. He lived most of
his life in California, where most of his fiction was set, either
literally or by displacing sf protocols into a nightmare of the Pacific
Rim. He attended college for one year at Berkeley, operated a record store
and ran a classical-music programme for a local radio station; he was
married five times, and had three children. From 1950 to 1970 he was
intensely and constantly productive - a circumstance only posthumously
made clear by the publication of several mainstream novels written during
the first years of his career. The order in which he wrote his many novels
is of importance in assessing their interrelation, and so the relevant
dates are indicated in the discussion below.He began his career with short
magazine fiction-his first published story was "Beyond Lies the Wub"
(1952) - and over the next few years came a number of ironic and
idiosyncratic short stories, some of which were collected in A Handful of
Darkness (written 1952-4; coll 1955 UK; with 2 stories cut 1966 UK), The
Variable Man and Other Stories (written 1952-4; coll 1957) and The Book of
Philip K. Dick (written 1952-5; coll 1973; vt The Turning Wheel and Other
Stories 1977 UK). The first three and a half volumes of THE COLLECTED
STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK are devoted to these early years. This set,
which is definitive, consists of 5 separate titles, all of which suffer
from a singularly unhelpful array of vts: Beyond Lies the Wub (coll 1987;
vt The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford 1990); Second Variety (coll
1987; vt We Can Remember it for You Wholesale, with "Second Variety"
dropped and the new title story added, 1990); The Father-Thing (coll 1987;
rev with "Second Variety" added, vt Second Variety 1991); The Days of
Perky Pat (coll 1987; vt The Minority Report 1991) and The Little Black
Box (coll 1987; vt We Can Remember it for you Wholesale 1991 UK; vt The
Eye of the Sibyl 1992 US).PKD's first novels - The Cosmic Puppets (written
1953; 1956 Satellite as "A Glass of Darkness"; exp 1957 dos) and Dr
Futurity (written 1953; 1954 TWS as "Time Pawn"; exp 1959 dos) - were
professional expansions of magazine tales and reveal his fingerprints to
hindsight; the former interestingly returns a man to his home-town which,
overlaid by manufactured illusion, serves as a battleground for two
warring forces who bear the aspects of Ormazd and Ahriman (the opposing
principles of Zoroastrian cosmology). PKD's PARANOIA about godlike
manipulations of consensual reality marks a theme he would obsessively
repeat in less crude form, just as the confusion of humans and mechanical
simulacra adumbrated in the second book might be considered one particular
variant of the major theme which runs right through PKD's work: the
juxtaposition of two "levels of reality" - one "objectively" determined,
the other a world of appearances imposed upon characters by various means
and processes.His first published book, SOLAR LOTTERY (written 1953-541955
dos; rev vt World of Chance 1955 UK - each text printing some material the
other excludes), has an immediate impact; it is a story belonging to, if
not rather dominating, a category prevalent in the early 1950s-the tale in
which future society is distorted by some particular set of idiosyncratic
priorities: in this case social opportunity is governed by lottery. The
plot of the novel is reminiscent of A.E. VAN VOGT, and juxtaposes
political intrigues with the utopian quest of the disciples of an
eccentric MESSIAH. This interest in messianic figures runs throughout
PKD's work as an important subsidiary theme. There are versions of it in
The World Jones Made (written 1954; 1956 dos), Vulcan's Hammer (1956
Future Science Fiction; exp 1960), and in his sf of the 1960s.But, after
writing The World Jones Made, a heated authoritarian DYSTOPIA, Eye in the
Sky (written 1955; 1957), which sophisticates the reality diseases of his
first novel, and the routine The Man who Japed (written 1955; 1956 dos),
PKD began an exceedingly ambitious - and totally unsuccessful - attempt to
break into the mainstream-novel market. From this period came Mary and the
Giant (written 1953-5; 1987), The Broken Bubble (written 1956; 1988),
Puttering About in a Small Land (written 1957; 1985), In Milton Lumky
Territory (written 1958-9; 1985), Confessions of a Crap Artist (written
1959; 1975), The Man whose Teeth were All Exactly Alike (written 1960;
1984) and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (written 1960; 1986 UK). Graceful, wry,
vulnerable, pessimistic and wise, they are novels less good only than the
best of PKD's intense prime, which began immediately.Time Out of Joint
(written 1958; 1959) is a bridge novel: its central character, who lives
in a peaceful POCKET-UNIVERSE enclave created for him by a war-torn
society so that it can exploit his precognitive talents, retains the
desire and capacity to defeat illusion and regain objective reality. In
later books the author became more and more fascinated by the various
unreal worlds he created. In the first of these, the HUGO-winning THE MAN
IN THE HIGH CASTLE (written 1961; 1962), his best-known single book, the
characters live in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which the Allies lost WWII (
HITLER WINS), but one of them eventually learns from the I-Ching that the
real world - manifest in the alternate through the pages of a novel - is
one in which the Allies won (though it is not our world). After this major
novel came, in close succession, the writing of three further books which
together constitute his finest achievement. Martian Time-Slip (written
1962; 1963 Worlds of Tomorrow as "All We Marsmen"; exp 1964) creates a
world irradiated by schizophrenic ( PARANOIA) perceptions, and moves with
frightening intensity - and hilarity - to an elegant transcendental
finale. Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (written 1963;
1965), is built more intricately than any other PKD novel upon a
plot-structure whose interconnections and layers themselves work as a
portrayal of the world - in this case a post- HOLOCAUST USA. THE THREE
STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (written 1964; 1965), more extremely than any
previous PKD book, inhabits the badlands within which the real and the
ersatz interpenetrate: suppliers of a hallucinogenic drug which makes life
tolerable for Martian colonists face opposition from the sinister
Eldritch, whose own new drug (imaged in language which recalls the
Communion wafer) pre-empts reality entirely.The complexity and stature of
these four books were perhaps muffled in the 1960s through their being
outnumbered by the less achieved PKD works that were being composed or
released at this same time - We Can Build You (written 1962; 1969 AMZ as
"A. Lincoln, Simulacrum", with last chapter added by Ted WHITE; text
restored 1972), The Game-Players of Titan (written 1963; 1963), The
Simulacra (written 1963; 1964), Now Wait for Last Year (written 1963;
1966), Clans of the Alphane Moon (written 1963-4; 1964), The Crack in
Space (written 1963-4; 1966), The Zap Gun (written 1964; 1967), The
Penultimate Truth (written 1964; 1964), The Unteleported Man (written
1964-5; first half only 1966 dos; both halves rev 1983; with short inserts
by John T. SLADEK rev vt Lies, Inc 1984 UK) and Counter-Clock World
(written 1965; 1967). None of these stories quite jell in the end - though
much happens of considerable interest - and none lack moments of
extraordinary cultural and psychological insight, sometimes presented in a
language singularly familiar with the large repertory of mind-states
accessible through the use of drugs. It was only with a late novel, A
SCANNER DARKLY (written 1973; 1977), that he would explore the more
negative human implications of drug-taking, though with an almost
hallucinated vehemence.In his next major novel, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF
ELECTRIC SHEEP? (written 1966; 1968; vt Blade Runner 1982), filmed in 1982
by Ridley SCOTT as BLADE RUNNER, PKD effectively climaxed the series of
novels in which mechanical simulacra of human beings - sometimes eminent -
figure as agents of illusion. In this tale, which became much more widely
known after the film, android animals are marketed to help expiate the
guilt people experience because real ones have been virtually
exterminated; simultaneously the protagonist must hunt down androids
illegally imported from MARS. In so doing, he learns that the society's
new MESSIAH may also be a fake; and that the landscapes of decay and
imposture may in fact only mirror his own condition. As with so many of
PKD's best books - like Martian-Time Slip, Dr Bloodmoney and THE THREE
STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH - the story takes place in a depleted
environment, with a small population existing in a derelict world. This
sense of a shrinking world intensifies in PKD's last two "untroubled"
works of genius: Ubik (written 1966; 1969), which features the creation of
a subjective world by a group of people killed in an accident but restored
to a kind of consciousness within a preservative machine, though any final
determination of what is real in the book is made superbly problematical;
and A Maze of Death (written 1968; 1970), a bleak poisoned exercise in
theology which has been described as his single finest work.From this
point in PKD's life, metaphysical questions began to dominate. GALACTIC
POT-HEALER (written 1967-8; 1969) begins almost as a parody, but soon
becomes involved in questions of predetermination and the Dualistic
conflict between darkness and light. Theological issues are paramount also
in the novelette "Faith of Our Fathers" (1967) and in Our Friends From
Frolix 8 (written 1968-9; 1970), the composition of which is illuminated
by Outline for Our Friends from Frolix 8 (written 1968; 1989 chap).As the
1970s began, theology gradually segued in PKD's own life into episodes of
paranoia and epiphany, climaxing in a religious experience in March 1974
which he spent much of the rest of his life analysing in the form of an
"Exegesis", of which a small, integral portion has been published as
Cosmogony and Cosmology (written 1978; 1987 chap UK); a large selection
from this material has been assembled as In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections
from the Exegesis (1991). The Selected Letters of Philip K.Dick: 1972-1973
(coll 1993), The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1974 (coll 1991)
andThe Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: 1975-76 (coll 1992) focus on
the same material; further volumes are projected.And, after 20 years, the
stream of novels became intermittent. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
(written 1970-73; 1974), which won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD,
mainly retreads old ground. It was followed by a rather unsatisfactory
collaboration with Roger ZELAZNY, Deus Irae (written 1964-75; fixup 1976).
Radio Free Albemuth (written 1976; 1985), which began to deal in "healthy"
fictional terms with the Exegesis material, was published only after PKD's
death.This latter novel is, in any case, a kind of draft of the finest
book of PKD's last years, VALIS (written 1978; 1981), a fragile but deeply
valiant self-analysis - he is two characters in the novel, a man who is
mad and a man who is not - conducted within the framework of a longing
search for the structure of meaning, the Vast Active Living Intelligence
System. The Divine Invasion (written 1980; 1981) and The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer (written 1981; 1982), which were assembled with their
predecessor as The VALIS Trilogy (omni 1989), share obsessional
search-patterns but little else. They were the books of a finished writer,
in every sense.The earlier PKD often lost control of his material in
ideative mazes and, sidetracked, was unable to find any resolution; but,
when he found the tale within his grasp, he was brilliantly inventive,
gaining access to imaginative realms which no other writer of sf had
reached. His sympathy for the plight of his characters - often
far-from-heroic, small, ordinary people trapped in difficult existential
circumstances - was unfailing, and his work had a human interest absent
from that of writers engaged by complexity and convolution for their own
sake. Even the most perilous metaphysical terrors of his finest novels
wore a complaining, vulnerable, human face. In all his work he was
astonishingly intimate, self-exposed, and very dangerous. He was the
funniest sf writer of his time, and perhaps the most terrifying. His
dreads were our own, spoken as we could not have spoken them. [BS/JC]Other
works: The Ganymede Takeover (written 1964-6; 1967) with Ray (R.F.)
NELSON; The Preserving Machine (written 1953-66; coll 1969; with 1 story
dropped 1971 UK); The Best of Philip K. Dick (written 1952-73; coll 1977)
ed John BRUNNER; A Letter from Philip K. Dick (written 1960; 1983 chap);
Nazism and the High Castle (written 1964?; 1964 Niekas; 1987 chap dos),
published with Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes (written 1965?; 1965
Niekas; 1987 chap dos); We Can Remember it for You Wholesale (written
1965; 1966 FSF; 1990 chap), filmed as TOTAL RECALL (1990); Nick and the
Glimmung (written 1966; 1988 UK), for children; Warning: We Are Your
Police (written 1967; 1985 chap); The Golden Man (written 1952-73; coll
1980); The Dark-Haired Girl (written 1972-5; coll 1988), mostly
nonfiction; Ubik: The Screenplay (written 1974; 1985).About the author:
The literature on PKD is enormous and daily growing. Here are a few
representative volumes: Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd (anth 1975) ed
Bruce GILLESPIE; Science-Fiction Studies, Mar 1975 and July 1988, 2
special issues devoted to PKD; The Novels of Philip K. Dick (1984) by Kim
Stanley ROBINSON; Only Apparently Real: The World of Philip K. Dick (1986)
by Paul WILLIAMS; Mind in Motion: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick
(1987) by Patricia WARRICK; To the High Castle: Philip K. Dick: A Life
1928-1962 (1989) by Gregg Rickman; Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K.
Dick (1989) by Lawrence Sutin, perhaps the most clear-sighted of the
biographical studies; Philip Kindred Dick, Metaphysical Conjurer: A
Working Bibliography (latest edn 1990) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil
STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ACE BOOKS; ALIENS; ANDROIDS; AUTOMATION;
BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; CITIES; COLLECTIONS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER
WORLDS; COMICS; COMPUTERS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CYBERNETICS; CYBORGS;
ENTROPY; ESP; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENETIC
ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; GREAT AND SMALL; HISTORY OF SF;
HUMOUR; INVASION; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MACHINES;
MATTER TRANSMISSION; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; METAPHYSICS; MUSIC; NEW WAVE; NEW
WORLDS; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OUTER PLANETS; PERCEPTION; PHILIP K. DICK
AWARD; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGY; RECURSIVE SF; REINCARNATION; RELIGION;
ROBOTS; SATIRE; TIMESCAPE BOOKS; TIME TRAVEL; VIRTUAL REALITY; WEAPONS.

DICKENS, CHARLES (JOHN HUFFHAM)
(1812-1870) UK writer, almost certainly the greatest novelist in the
English language. CD wrote considerable fantasy - including most famously
A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (1843) - but
no sf proper. However, it has been argued, most recently by John CLUTE in
Horror: 100 Best Books (anth 1988; rev 1992) ed Stephen Jones and Kim
NEWMAN, that the nightmarish, almost futuristic London which figures in
several of his later novels, from Bleak House (1853) through Our Mutual
Friend (1865), was a central influence - via G.K. CHESTERTON, Robert Louis
STEVENSON and others - in the creation of 19th-century urban England as a
stamping-ground for STEAMPUNK. Like William MORRIS, Lord DUNSANY and
J.R.R. TOLKIEN after him, CD is central to the geography of sf.It is also
arguable that Mugby Junction (anth 1866 chap), a self-contained volume
published as an extra Christmas number of CD's magazine All the Year
Round, may constitute the first SHARED-WORLD anthology of genre interest.
[JC]Other works: The Chimes (dated 1845 but 1844); The Cricket on the
Hearth (dated 1846 but 1845); The Haunted Man, and The Ghost's Bargain
(coll 1848).See also: ENTROPY.

DICKINSON, PETER (MALCOLM de BRISSAC)
(1927- ) UK writer, born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), educated at
Eton and King's College, Cambridge; for 17 years assistant editor of the
humorous magazine Punch. PD is best known for his detective stories, but
he has written one adult sf novel, The Green Gene (1973), an amusing
SATIRE on many issues including racial prejudice, set in an
ALTERNATE-WORLD UK, where all Celts possess a gene that gives them green
skin. It was runner-up for the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD. An adult
detective novel, King and Joker (1976), is set in an alternate England
where George V's elder brother Clarence did not die of pneumonia but lived
to become King Victor I; its belated sequel was Skeleton-in-Waiting
(1989). Two other adult thrillers have ambiguously fantastic elements,
Sleep and his Brother (1971) and Walking Dead (1977).PD's most important
contribution to sf is his Changes trilogy for children: in order of
internal chronology the novels are The Devil's Children (1971), Heartsease
(1970) and THE WEATHERMONGER (1968; with chapters 10 and 11 rev, 1969 US),
all assembled as The Changes (omni 1975; vt The Changes Trilogy 1985; vt
The Changes: A Trilogy 1991 US). They deal with an inexplicable change in
English life when the population suddenly turns against MACHINES and
adopts medieval superstitions. The Devil's Children, where a 12-year-old
girl is adopted by a band of travelling Sikhs, is the most sensitive, and
THE WEATHERMONGER, which features Merlin, the most fantastic and baroque.
There are minor inconsistencies in the world picture from book to book.In
1972 the BBC presented a six-episode sf serial for children, Man Dog,
written by PD, and novelized as Mandog * (1972) by Lois LAMPLUGH. Escapees
from the 26th century transfer their leader's mind into a dog belonging to
one of a group of children in the present. They are pursued by future
police.Many of PD's other juveniles have fantastic elements: Emma Tupper's
Diary (1971) is a Loch Ness Monster story; The Dancing Bear (1972) is a
fantasy set in the 5th century; The Gift (1973) has a telepathic boy in a
thriller with mythic overtones; The Blue Hawk (1976), which won the
Guardian Award for Best Children's Book of the year, is set in an
imaginary ancient kingdom, where the gods are withdrawing their magic from
the world; Chance, Luck and Destiny (coll 1975) contains an sf story, "Mr
Monnow"; Annerton Pit (1977) features an ambiguous presence - it may be
sciencefictional rather than fantastic - lurking in a mineshaft of ill
repute; Tulku (1979) has fantastic happenings in Tibet; Healer (1983; vt
The Healer 1985 US) has a girl with special powers; and Eva (1988) has a
girl's personality transferred to a chimpanzee after a car accident - much
social adjustment is necessary.PD's juveniles are uneven, but at their
best they are among the finest in the genre: various, nonconformist and
vivid, often giving old themes new life by thinking them through afresh
from the beginning, rather than accepting them as givens. [PN]Other works
(all juveniles): The Iron Lion (1972 chap US; rev 1983 chap UK); The
Flight of Dragons (1979), nonfiction; The Seventh Raven (1983); Giant Cold
(1984 chap); Hundreds and Hundreds (anth 1984);A Box of Nothing (1985);
Merlin Dreams (coll of linked stories 1988); AK (1990); A Bone from a Dry
Sea (1992); Time and the Clockmice, Etcetera (1993); Shadow of a Hero
(1994).See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); CHILDREN'S SF;
MAGIC.

DICK-LAUDER, [Sir] GEORGE (ANDREW)
(1917-1981) British Army officer who began a writing career after his
retirement from the service. His two sf novels, Our Man for Ganymede
(1969) and A Skull and Two Crystals (1972), though not innovative, do
explore the conventions of SPACE OPERA in a manner both literate and
alert. [JC]

DICKSON, CARTER
John Dickson CARR.

DICKSON, GORDON R(UPERT)
(1923- ) Canadian-born writer, resident in the USA since age 13 and long
a US citizen. He was educated (along with Poul ANDERSON) at the University
of Minnesota, taking his BA in English in 1948, and remains in Minnesota.
Through the Minneapolis Fantasy Society, which he re-established after
WWII, he became friends with Anderson, with whom he later collaborated on
the Hoka series - Earthman's Burden (coll 1957), Star Prince Charlie
(1975) and Hoka! (coll 1982) - and with Clifford D. SIMAK. Along with
these writers, GRD has shown a liking, often indulged, for hinterland
settings peopled by solid farming or small-town stock whose ideologies,
when expressed, violate any simple, conservative-liberal polarity, though
urban readers and critics tend to respond to them as right-wing. As late
as Wolf and Iron (1974 FSF as "In Iron Years"; much exp 1990) - which
embodies a SURVIVALIST plot considerably deepened by the author's detailed
and compassionate attachment to the kind of hero who understands and loves
the physical world - he was still mining this fertile venue.GRD began
publishing sf in 1950 with "Trespass" for Fantastic Story Quarterly,
written with Anderson, and he has since been a prolific and consistent
short-story author; much of this material was assembled in the 1980s in
volumes like The Man from Earth (coll 1983), Dickson! (coll 1984; rev vt
Steel Brother 1985) and Forward! (coll 1985), the latter ed Sandra MIESEL,
long an advocate of his works.GRD's first novel, Alien from Arcturus (1956
dos; rev vt Arcturus Landing 1979), established from an early date the
tone of underlying and rather relentless seriousness which became so
marked in later works, while at the same time succumbing to a tendency to
displace emotional intensities from human relations between the sexes to
those obtaining between human and dependent ALIEN (or, as in Wolf and
Iron, Terran mammal). The aliens in Alien from Arcturus are decidedly
cuddly, with shining black noses, and much resemble those who appear in
Space Winners (1965), a juvenile, and The Alien Way (1965), about an
Earthman's telepathic rapport with the representative of a species that
may invade. But the strong narrative skills deployed in these
comparatively rudimentary SPACE-OPERA tales, along with an idiomatic
capacity to write novel-length fiction, has ensured the survival of these
relatively unambitious works. Some later singletons - like Sleepwalker's
World (1971), a dystopian vision of OVERPOPULATION, and The R-Master
(1973; rev vt The Last Master 1983), in which a society is ambiguously
guided by a saviour whose origins lie more in PULP-MAGAZINE ideas than in
philosophy-failed to maintain the elation of the earlier books.While
continuing to produce prolifically in the 1950s and 1960s, GRD
simultaneously engaged upon a sequence of novels which was to occupy much
of his energy for decades. The ongoing Childe Cycle - the sf volumes of
which are often known as the Dorsai series - is intended to present an
evolutionary blueprint, in highly dramatized fictional terms, for
humanity's ultimate expansion through the Galaxy, as an inherently ethical
species. "In order to make this type of story work effectively," GRD has
said, "I developed by the late 1950s a new fictional pattern that I have
called the 'consciously thematic story'. This was specifically designed to
create an unconscious involvement of the reader with the philosophical
thematic argument that the story action renders and demonstrates. Because
this new type of story has represented a pattern hitherto unknown to
readers and writers, my work has historically been criticized in terms
that do not apply to it - primarily as if it were drama alone." However,
though GRD originally planned to present his thesis through a phased
publication of the entire sequence - to include at least three historical
titles and three contemporary novels as well as the several books set in
the future - only the Dorsai books have yet been released, and the full
integrity of GRD's argument remains, therefore, undemonstrated.In rough
order of internal chronology, the Childe Cycle comprises (1995):
Necromancer (1962; vt No Room for Man 1963), The Tactics of Mistake
(1971), Soldier, Ask Not (1964 Gal; exp 1967), the short form of which won
a HUGO for 1964, and The Genetic General (1959 ASF as "Dorsai!"; cut 1960
dos; text restored vt DORSAI! 1976), all but Soldier, Ask Not being
assembled as Three to Dorsai! (omni 1975); The Spirit of Dorsai (coll of
linked stories 1979) and Lost Dorsai (coll of linked stories 1980; rev
1988 UK), whose title story won a 1981 Hugo, most of both volumes being
reassembled with some material preceding The Genetic General as The Dorsai
Companion (coll of linked stories 1986); and a final grouping of texts,
all set about 100 years further into the future: the overlong Young Bleys
(1991), Other (1994),The Final Encyclopedia (1984) and The Chantry Guild
(1988), the last volume - GRD claimed as early as 1983 - being hived off
from a projected final volume to be called Childe. As the sequence
develops, human space is divided into four spheres plus Old Earth herself,
with her vast genetic pool; Dorsai, whose inhabitants are bred as
professional soldiers; the Exotic worlds, whose inhabitants are bred to
creative (sometimes sybaritic) mind-arts; the worlds (like Newton) which
emphasize physical science; and the God-haunted Friendly worlds, where
folk are bred for faith. The task of mankind's genetic elite is somehow to
merge these variant strains, and the philosophical burden of the sequence
tends to be conveyed through plots whose origins lie unabashedly in the
SUPERMAN tales of earlier sf. The Genetic General, which in its restored
form remains the most arousing of these, features Donal Graeme, the
central incarnation of a triune evolutionary superman whose earlier life
is told in Necromancer, and who is reborn as Hal Mayne to climax the
series - and the genetic elitism it promulgates - through its final (to
date) volumes. The terms GRD uses to describe his superman's capacities -
Graeme, for instance, being capable of a potent sort of cognitive
intuition - are perhaps best appreciated within the massive, ongoing
rhythm of the series; for it is as a novelist, not as a philosopher, that
GRD reveals his strength.Very little of GRD's later fiction, however
hastily written some of it may seem, fails to pose questions and arguments
about humankind's fundamental nature. From 1960 much of his work has
specifically reflected his preoccupation with the concept that humankind
is inevitably driven to higher evolutionary states, a notion often
expressed, however, in tales - like None But Man (1969; with 1 story
added, as coll 1989) or Hour of the Horde (1970) - that contrast
humankind's indomitable spirit with that of ALIENS whose lack of
comparable elan makes them into straw horses for Homo sapiens to defeat.
More serious presentations of material - from the fine Timestorm (fixup
1977) on to ponderous later tales like Way of the Pilgrim (1980 ASF as
"The Cloak and the Staff"; much exp 1987) - do generally avoid the graver
pitfalls of pulp. Though his sometimes unremitting use of genre
conventions to provide solutions to serious arguments has undoubtedly
retarded full recognition of his talent and seriousness, the later volumes
of the Childe Cycle series increasingly enforce a more measured response
to his life work.GRD won the NEBULA for Best Novelette with "Call Him
Lord" (1966). He was President of the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA
1969-71. In 1981, he won Hugos not only for "Lost Dorsai" but also for a
short story, "The Cloak and the Staff". [JC]Other works: Mankind on the
Run (1956 dos; vt On the Run 1979); Time to Teleport (1955 Science Fiction
Stories as "No More Barriers"; 1960 chap dos) and Delusion World (1955
Science Fiction Stories as "Perfectly Adjusted"; exp 1961 dos), both later
published in omnibus format (omni 1981); the Dilbia series, comprising
Spacial Delivery (1961 dos) and Spacepaw (1969); Naked to the Stars
(1961); the Underseas series, later assembled as Secrets of the Deep (omni
1985) and comprising Secret Under the Sea (1960), Secret Under Antarctica
(1963) and Secret Under the Caribbean (1964); Mission to Universe (1965;
rev 1977); Planet Run (1967; rev as coll with 2 stories added, vt Planet
Run, Plus Two Bonus Stories 1982) with Keith LAUMER; The Space Swimmers
(1967), which serves as a sequel to Home from the Shore (1963 Gal; exp
1978); Wolfling (1969); Mutants: A Science Fiction Adventure (coll 1970),
in which the stories are linked thematically; Danger-Human (coll 1970; vt
The Book of Gordon R. Dickson 1973); The Pritcher Mass (1972); The
Outposter (1972); The Day the Sun Stood Still (anth 1972), a common-theme
anthology with Poul Anderson and Robert SILVERBERG; The Star Road (coll
1973); Alien Art (1973), a juvenile, later assembled with Arcturus Landing
as Alien Art; Arcturus Landing (omni 1978); Ancient, My Enemy (coll 1974);
Gremlins, Go Home! (1974), a juvenile with Ben BOVA; The Lifeship (1976;
vt Lifeboat 1978 UK) with Harry HARRISON; the Dragon and the George
fantasy sequence comprising The Dragon and the George (as "St Dragon and
the George" FSF 1957; exp 1976), The Dragon Knight (1990), The Dragon on
the Border (1992), The Dragon at War (1993) and The Dragon, the Earl and
the Troll (1994) Gordon R. Dickson's SF Best (coll 1978; exp vt In the
Bone 1987); The Far Call (1978), a rare NEAR-FUTURE tale of the space
programme; Pro (1978); Masters of Everon (1979); In Iron Years (coll
1980); Love Not Human (coll 1981); Survival! (coll 1984); Jamie the Red
(1984) with Roland GREEN; Beyond the Dar al-Harb (coll 1985); Invaders!
(coll 1985); The Man the Worlds Rejected (coll 1986); The Last Dream (coll
1986); Mindspan (coll 1986) ed Sandra Miesel; The Forever Man (1986);
Stranger (coll 1986); Guided Tour (coll 1988); Beginnings (coll 1988);
Ends (coll 1988); The Earth Lords (1989).As Editor: Rod Serling's Triple
W: Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves (anth 1963); Rod Serling's Devils and
Demons (anth 1967); Combat SF (anth 1975); Nebula Winners Twelve (anth
1978); the War and Honor sequence of SHARED-WORLD anthologies, beginning
with The Harriers * (anth 1991) and The Harriers #2: Blood and Honor *
(anth 1993); Robot Warriors (anth 1991).About the author: Gordon R.
Dickson: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1983) by Raymond H.
Thompson; Gordon Rupert Dickson, First Dorsai: A Working Bibliography
(latest edn 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See
also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; CANADA; CHILDREN'S SF; COMPUTERS;
CYBORGS; ECOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EVOLUTION; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GALAXY SCIENCE
FICTION; HUMOUR; INVASION; LINGUISTICS; MATHEMATICS; PARALLEL WORLDS;
POLITICS; PSI POWERS; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SPACESHIPS; TIME TRAVEL; UNDER
THE SEA; WAR; WEAPONS.

DIETZ, WILLIAM C(OREY)
(1945- ) US writer who began to publish sf with War World (1986), the
first volume of his Sam McCade sequence of sf adventures about an
interstellar bounty hunter, which continued with Imperial Bounty (1988),
Alien Bounty (1990) and McCade's Bounty (1990). The galactic venue of the
series exhibits some interesting kinks, and McCade himself gradually gains
individuality. Singletons include Freehold (1987), military sf; Prison
Planet (1989); Cluster Command (1989) with David A. DRAKE, - one of the
latter's Crisis of Empire sequence; Matrix Man (1990), a complicated,
fast-moving tale set in a NEAR-FUTURE Earth whose seas and population are
continuing to rise, and where a nefarious peace foundation (run in fact by
a huge corporation) opposes attempts by the Exodus Society to foment
emigration; Mars Prime (1992); Legion of the Damned (1993) and Bodyguard
(1994) As in his work in general, the right side wins. As an author of
entertainments, WCD stands out for his thorough grasp of the devices of
sf. [JC]

DIEUDONNE, FLORENCE (LUCINDA) CARPENTER
(1850-? ) US writer. In her Rondah, or Thirty-Three Years in a Star
(1887) the tale's several protagonists travel through the Solar System in
a large ASTEROID (not a star). Transported to this asteroid by a
pre-arranged explosion, the central figure of the tale becomes king of the
native bird-people, in fact of vegetable origin, who are replaced by
ferocious elves when the worldlet cools down. Much happens. In the end,
the protagonist, with his woman, seems destined to rule the Universe. The
book is a cacophony of irreconcilable elements, but the author's extremely
fertile imagination, when harnessed, manages to create a tale which
significantly prefigures 20th-century cosmological SPACE OPERA. Xartella
(1891), self-published, is fantasy. [JC]

Di FATE, VINCENT
(1945- ) US sf illustrator (name sometimes rendered DiFate). He was born
in Yonkers, New York, and like many other sf illustrators attended the New
York-Phoenix Institute. He began his career doing tv animation for Ralph
Bakshi; his first professional sf illustration was for Analog (Aug 1969)
and most of his magazine work has been for ASF. Many of his paintings have
been for paperback book covers. His artwork, suprisingly impressionistic
for someone who frequently works with technological subjects like
spacecraft, is often moody and sombre. He was one of the NASA artists for
the Apollo/Soyuz programme in 1975 and has worked for NASA since. He won
the HUGO for Best Professional Artist in 1979 and has been nominated many
other times. VDF lectures on art and is also well known for his
occasional, interesting, long-running column about sf illustration,
Sketches, from 1976 in the semiprozine ALGOL and in its surviving sister
magazine SF CHRONICLE. A book of his work is Di Fate's Catalog of Science
Fiction Hardware (1980) by VDF and Ian Summers. [JG/PN]See also:
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.

DIGEST
A term used to describe a magazine format, in contrast to, for example,
BEDSHEET and pulp ( PULP MAGAZINES), which are both larger. The page size
of a digest is approximately 5.5 x 7.5in (about 140 x 190mm), though it
can vary slightly; for example, Gal was normally a little smaller than
ASF. ASF was the first important sf magazine to turn digest, in 1943, and
by the mid-1950s almost all SF MAGAZINES had followed suit, the
pulp-magazine format disappearing. By the 1980s, however, many sf
magazines had turned to a small-bedsheet, stapled, "slick" format. The
digest format is just a little larger than that of the normal paperback
book, which averages 4.5 x 7in (about 115 x 180mm); the paperback format
has also been used for some magazines, notably NW in the mid-1960s. [PN]

DIKTY, T(HADDEUS MAXIM) E(UGENE)
(1920-1991) US editor and publisher, married from 1953 to Julian MAY,
about whose work he compiled The Work of Julian May: An Annotated
Bibliography & Guide (1985) with R. REGINALD. An early sf fan, TED started
an sf checklist on index cards with the collector Frederick Shoyer in
1939, but the cards were lost in WWII. After the war, with Erle Korshak
and Mark Reinsberg, he became a bookseller and passed the partially
reassembled checklist on to Everett F. BLEILER, who used it to compile The
Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948) - the first comprehensive
BIBLIOGRAPHY in the sf field - which TED and Korshak founded SHASTA
PUBLISHERS to put into print. TED was also associated with the setting-up
of the publishers Carcosa House. With Bleiler, TED edited an annual
ANTHOLOGY series - the first "year's-best" series to appear in the field:
The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1949 (anth 1949) and The Best Science
Fiction Stories, 1950 (anth 1950; cut vt The Best Science Fiction Stories
1951 UK), both assembled as Science Fiction Omnibus (omni 1952); The Best
Science Fiction Stories, 1951 (anth 1951; cut vt The Best Science Fiction
Stories, Second Series 1952 UK; further cut vt The Mindworm 1967 UK); The
Best Science-Fiction Stories, 1952 (anth 1952; cut vt The Best Science
Fiction Stories, Third Series 1953 UK); The Best Science-Fiction Stories,
1953 (anth 1953; cut vt The Best Science Fiction Stories, Fourth Series
1955 UK); The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1954 (anth 1954; cut vt The
Best Science Fiction Stories, Fifth Series 1956 UK). Frontiers in Space
(anth 1955) contains a selection from the second, third and fourth
volumes. A second series, Year's Best Science Fiction Novels, presented a
selection of longer stories: Year's Best Science Fiction Novels, 1952
(anth 1952; cut vt Year's Best Science Fiction Novels 1953 UK), 1953 (anth
1953; cut vt Category Phoenix 1955 UK) and 1954 (anth 1954; cut vt Year's
Best Science Fiction Novels, Second Series 1955 UK). Together they also
edited Imagination Unlimited (anth 1952; cut vt Men of Space and Time 1953
UK), which contains stories on each of 15 sciences.After the collaboration
with Bleiler ended, TED went on to produce three further "best" volumes as
sole editor: The Best Science-Fiction Stories and Novels, 1955 (anth 1955;
cut vt 5 Tales from Tomorrow 1957), The Best Science-Fiction Stories and
Novels, 1956 (anth 1956; cut vt 6 from Worlds Beyond 1958) and The Best
Science-Fiction Stories and Novels, Ninth Series (anth 1958). He also
edited Every Boy's Book of Outer Space Stories (anth 1960) and two theme
anthologies about MARS and the MOON: Great Science Fiction about Mars
(anth 1966) and Great Science Fiction Stories about the Moon (anth
1967).In the 1950s, after Shasta had collapsed in ignominy, TED formed
Publication Associates with Julian May, and worked closely with her on
various projects for the rest of his life, acting as her agent and editor
on all her mature work. In 1972, with Darrell C. Richardson, he founded
and, with the added help of Robert E. WEINBERG, ran FAX COLLECTOR'S
EDITIONS, a publishing enterprise aimed at reprinting material, often in
facsimile, from old magazines; at about the same time (though its first
title did not appear until 1976), and also with Weinberg (who dropped out
after a year), he founded STARMONT HOUSE to produce monographs on
individual sf writers, along with some bibliographies and fiction,
anonymously editing for the firm one anthology, Worlds Within Worlds: Four
Classic Argosy Tales of Science Fiction (anth 1991). Two of his and Julian
May's children carried on with the firm after his death. [JC/MJE]See also:
SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS.

DILLARD, J(EANNE) M.
(1954- ) US writer. Most of her works are STAR TREK ties, including
Mindshadow * (1986), Demons * (1986), Bloodthirst * (1987), Star Trek V:
The Final Frontier * (1989), which novelizes the 1989 film, The Lost Years
* (1989), The Undiscovered Country * (1992), which novelizes STAR TREK VI:
THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY (1991), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Emissary *
(1993), and the non- fictionStar Trek: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A
History in Pictures (1994). JMD has also written War of the Worlds: The
Resurrection * (1988), tied to the tv series, and Specters (1991), a
horror novel. [JC]

DILLON, LEO
(1933- ) and DIANE (1933- ) US illustrators, the only team (married in
1957) ever to win a HUGO for Best Professional Artist, which they did in
1971. They have been freelancing since 1958, at first working separately.
Together their work has covered many fields: record album covers,
advertising art, Christmas cards, children's books and movie posters among
them; they are among the most respected commercial artists in the USA.
Their sf work for ACE BOOKS in the late 1960s (notably for the Ace
Specials) was particularly good, though perhaps their most celebrated work
has been for children's books, winning them Caldecott Medals for Why
Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears (1976) and Ashanti to Zulu (1977). They
have designed especially strong covers for books by Harlan ELLISON. Their
sf production has been only occasional since about 1972. Their work is
often similar to wood-block prints: rough, sometimes semi-abstract shapes
powerfully assembled. They are, however, extremely versatile and work in a
variety of styles and media, notably an Art Nouveau-derived look
reminiscent of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), as can be seen in The Art of Leo
and Diane Dillon (1981) ed Byron PREISS. Richard M. POWERS was one of the
first to show that semi-abstract images of some sophistication could sell
sf; the Dillons went on to prove the point incontrovertibly. [JG/PN]See
also: FANTASY; ILLUSTRATION.

DILOV, LJUBEN
[r] BULGARIA.

DIME-NOVEL SF
Dime-novel sf, which was almost wholly boys' fiction, appeared in two
media: serially in such BOYS' PAPERS as Golden Hours, Happy Days, The Boys
of New York and Young Men of America, or as complete stories in series
publications like The Wide Awake Weekly, The Boy's Star Library, New York
Five Cent Library, the FRANK READE LIBRARY and The Nugget Library. The
most important publishers were Frank Tousey, Publisher, Norman L. Munro
and STREET & SMITH.Formats varied considerably, from crown-8vo-size books
to 9 x 121/2in (about 230 x 320mm) saddle-wired (saddle-stitched)
pamphlets, but from the turn of the century most dime novels were either
saddle-wired single-signature pamphlets of around 81/2 x 11in (about 215 x
280mm) or 5 x 7in (about 125 x 180mm) side-stapled paperbound books of
several signatures. (All of these formats are rendered here in the US
style; i.e., width followed by height.) It is the 81/2 x 11in pamphlet -
similar in dimension to BEDSHEET-format - that is usually, though not very
logically, described as "dime-novel format", but then the term "dime
novel" itself is inaccurate, since most commonly they cost a nickel
(5cents) or 6cents, rather than a dime (10cents). All dime novels were
printed on cheap paper - sometimes very poor indeed - and it is therefore
now difficult to locate examples in good condition.Almost all dime-novel
sf falls into three basic categories: the invention story ( DISCOVERY AND
INVENTION), the lost-race story ( LOST WORLDS) and the marvel story. These
types occasionally overlap in minor ways.The invention story originated
with Edward S. ELLIS's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), in which
Ellis, a prolific and popular writer, adapted the historical Newark Steam
Man into a conventional Western story. This first publication seems to
have been without influence, but one of the later reprintings (as The Huge
Hunter, 1876) came to the attention of Frank Tousey, a rival publisher,
who commissioned a similar work, Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the
Plains (The Boys of New York 1876 as "The Steam Man of the Plains"; 1892
as by "Noname"), from Harry Enton (pseudonym of Harold Cohen [1854-1927]).
This initiated the important series about the Frank Reade family of
inventors ( FRANK READE LIBRARY). Enton followed this with two sequels
about Frank Reade, with steam engines shaped into horses.These stories,
together with Ellis's work, set the pattern for future invention stories.
The initial model was the dime-novel Western. Stress was on iron
technology, with little or no science; narratives contained random,
thrilling incidents, often presented in a disjointed and puerile way.
Typical social patterns were: a conscious attempt to capitalize on age
conflict, with boy inventors outdoing their elders ( EDISONADE);
aggressive, exploitative capitalism, particularly at the expense of
"primitive" peoples; the frontier mentality, with slaughter of
"primitives" (in the first Frank Reade, Jr. story Frank kills about 250
Native Americans, to say nothing of destroying an inhabited village);
strong elements of sadism; ethnic rancour focused on Native Americans,
Blacks, Irish and, later, Mexicans and Jews.After Enton's three stories
and a fourth of unknown authorship, the invention dime novel was taken
over by Luis SENARENS, who (with anonymous associates) wrote a long series
of Frank Reade, Jr. stories 1882-98, culminating in the Frank Reade
Library. In this series the type of invention shifted to electric air
vessels, land rovers and submarines, all showing the strong influence of
Jules VERNE. The narrative more typically became one of (frequently
inaccurate) geographical exploration and adventure, sometimes
incorporating minor lost-race episodes.The Frank Reade, Jr. stories were
historically the most important invention stories, but other story chains
existed, as did individual stories about other boy inventors with airships
or submarines. When the sales of the Frank Reade Library languished,
Tousey issued a companion series, the Jack Wright stories, again by
Senarens. Competing boy-inventor series from Street & Smith appeared: the
doings of Tom Edison, Jr., written mostly by Philip READE, and Electric
Bob, written by Robert Toombes. Both series are much superior to the Frank
Reade, Jr. stories in content and writing, and both are morally less
offensive, but neither of them had the cultural impact of Tousey's Frank
Reade Library.The dime-novel lost-race story did not necessarily follow
the full pattern of its adult counterpart (colonial exploitation, mythic
elements, sacred-vs-secular clashes, exotic sex partners, destruction of
the land, etc.), but was often a frank chronicle of smugly justified
looting. As Senarens said in Jack Wright and his Prairie Engine (The Boys'
Star Library 1892; 1908), Jack having "liberated" an enormous diamond:
"There was no crime in taking it. It was part of an idol, worshipped in
lieu of heaven, and wresting such an object from infidels is no crime in
the eyes of the Almighty." Typical lost-race dime novels are: Frank Reade,
Jr., and His Electric Coach (The Boys of New York 1890-91; 1893) by
"Noname", with Ancient Hebrews; The Missing Island (1894) by "Noname",
with Aztecs; A Trip to the Center of the Earth (New York Boys' Weekly
1878; 1894) by Howard De Vere (pseudonym of Howard Van Orden), which has
acculturated early Americans with interesting speech changes; The Lost
Captain (1880; 1906) by Frederick Whittaker, with Old Norse at the North
Pole; Lost at the South Pole (The Boys of New York 1888 as by J.G.
Bradley; 1899 as by Capt. Thomas H. Wilson), with strange races; Among the
Fire Worshipers (The Boys of New York 1880 as by Berton Bertrew; 1902 as
by Howard Austin), with Aztecs; "Underground" (Golden Hours May-July 1890)
by Thomas P. Montfort, with Toltecs in Australia; and Across the Frozen
Sea (1894) by "Noname", again with Old Norse at the North Pole. An unusual
dime novel for adults is El Rubio Bravo, King of the Swordsmen (1881) by
Col. Thomas Hoyer Monstery, about Aztecs.Lost-race stories turned up
unexpectedly elsewhere. The detective stories about Nick CARTER written by
Frederic Rensselaer Dey (1861-1922) under the pseudonym Chickering Carter
provide several examples. In The Index of Seven Stars (1907) and An
Amazonian Queen (1907) Nick has adventures among a lost race of mixed Old
Norse and Indian origin, ruled by women, and excels in the gladiatorial
arena. A 7-vol series beginning with Facing an Unseen Terror (1907) and
ending with The Seven-Headed Monster (1907) describes a supercivilization
hidden in the foothills of the Himalayas, with flying machines lofted by a
new radioactive element: the hidden race has also mastered electricity,
vibration and the lifeforce. This time the mighty Nick meets his superior
in the wicked scientist Zanabayah.Lost-race incidents of a more marginal
kind frequently occur in invention and geographical-adventure dime novels.
In most cases they are concerned with Pre-Columbian American peoples,
based loosely on popular American archaeology, and sometimes influenced by
the work of H. Rider HAGGARD. In "marvel" dime novels lost-race situations
are also common, usually concerning themselves with imaginary peoples
possessing high civilizations.This third group of dime novels, stressing
"marvel" elements, emerged in the late 1880s and reached its fullest
development in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. The
"marvel" tale was no longer a Vernean yarn of geographical adventure or
one of Wild West thrills and high jinks, but frankly set its protagonist
into extremely fantastic circumstances, often seemingly supernatural,
which were almost always rationalized. Instead of savage Indians, Western
badmen, malicious "Greasers", pirates, bears, giant snakes, sea serpents,
frenzied whales and giant octopuses, it utilized dwarfs, giants, strangely
teratological races, outlandish customs, mammoths, magical gems and
crystals, bobbing and ducking islands, wonderful cavern worlds and
mysterious appearances and disappearances. Inventions, when they appeared,
were more likely to be the product of alien races than the brainchildren
of boy inventors. Instead of operating steam or electric land rovers,
flying ship-hulls and Nautilus-like submarines, heroes might encounter
bizarre means of transportation: ANTIGRAVITY airships or vehicles powered
by fantastic new energies, sometimes suggested by Bulwer LYTTON's "vril".
The purportedly realistic geography of the Vernean dime novel yielded to
outlandish ambiences in Antarctica, inside the HOLLOW EARTH or even on
other planets.The central theme of the "marvel" story was no longer
mechanical exploitation or destruction of the environment (and weaker
peoples), as in the Frank Reade, Jr. stories, but encounter with the
strange, grotesque, magical and inexplicable. The note of sadism and
ethnic rancour that permeated the earlier invention stories was usually
lacking, or at least much toned down.Some marvel elements appeared in the
later Frank Reade, Jr. stories, but they were found in much finer form in
the sometimes very imaginative work of Francis W. DOUGHTY, Fred THORPE and
Cornelius SHEA. Other significant marvel stories included Six Weeks in the
Moon (1896) by "Noname" (perhaps Senarens), Under the World (Golden Hours
as "Into the Maelstrom" 1894; 1906) by John DE MORGAN and "Three Boys from
the Moon" (Happy Days Aug-Sep 1901) as by Gaston Garne (a Norman L. Munro
house name).Apart from the work of Verne and Haggard, contemporary adult
sf had almost no influence on dime-novel sf. Imaginary- WAR stories are
rare, the only significant one being "Holland, the Destroyer" (Golden
Hours 1900-1) by Hal Harkaway (house name used here by Edward T.
STRATEMEYER), in which the USA, at war with almost the entire world, is
saved by a supersubmarine. Interplanetary elements enter the last Frank
Reade, Jr. stories and Doughty's pseudonymous Two Boys on a Trip to an
Unknown Planet (The Boys of New York 1989 as by Albert J. Booth; 1901 as
by Richard R. Montgomery), but they are fantastic and show no knowledge of
contemporary adult work. Weldon J. COBB, a Chicago author, presumably read
a US newspaper adaptation of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (Pearson's
Magazine 1897; 1898): his At War with Mars (Golden Hours Sep-Nov 1897;
1907) reads as near-plagiarism, with Martian cylinders striking in the USA
- as an original element, the Martians have fitted out Phobos as an armed
space station for the attack on Earth. Cobb's "To Mars with Tesla" (New
Golden Hours Mar-May 1901) contains an abortive space flight - the landing
point proves to be the Southwest desert, not MARS as planned.The sf dime
novel has had a larger influence on later sf than has been generally
recognized. The invention story of the Frank Reade, Jr. sort led directly,
through the Stratemeyer Syndicate, to such boys' fiction as TOM SWIFT (see
also JUVENILE SERIES). Many early PULP-MAGAZINE sf-adventure stories are
simply dime novels translated for an older readership, while individual
points of influence are common enough. The situations in Edgar Rice
BURROUGHS's Opar and A. MERRITT's Muria ("The Conquest of the Moon Pool"
1919) seem to be indebted to dime novels, while Rex STOUT's Under the
Andes (All-Story 1914; 1984) is simply a Cornelius Shea sort of story with
modifications. A. Conan DOYLE's The Lost World (1912) was probably
influenced by "Noname"'s The Island in the Air (1896), and David LINDSAY's
A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) possibly by Doughty's Two Boys on a Trip to an
Unknown Planet. One can also link the episodic structure and strange races
in L. Frank BAUM's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) with "marvel" dime
novels.There were European equivalents and near-equivalents of Dime
Novels, one of the most interesting being the German periodical Der
LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF , featuring Captain Mors, which
was a pure SPACE-OPERA series, the earliest known. (For UK equivalents
BOYS' PAPERS.) [EFB]

DIMENSION 5
(vt Dimension Four US) Film (1966). United Pictures and Harold Goldman
Associates. Dir Franklin Adreon, starring Jeffrey Hunter, France Nuyen,
Harold Sakata, Donald Woods. Screenplay Arthur C. Pierce. 92 mins, cut to
88 mins. Colour.Adreon and Pierce were the team that made CYBORG 2087
(also 1966). This equally cheap production has Sakata, who played the
villain Oddjob in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964), as one of the
Chinese communists who plan to blow up Los Angeles by planting an H-bomb.
They are foiled by a US secret agent who can go back and forth in time by
pressing a button on his belt. [JB]

DIMENSION FOUR
DIMENSION 5.

DIMENSIONS
We perceive three spatial dimensions, but theoretical MATHEMATICS is
easily capable of dealing with many more. Conventional graphical analysis
frequently represents time as a dimension, encouraging consideration of it
as the "fourth dimension". The possible existence of PARALLEL WORLDS
displaced from ours along a fourth spatial dimension (in the same way that
a series of two-dimensional universes might lie next to one another like
the pages of a book) is a popular hypothesis in sf, and such worlds are
frequently referred to as "other dimensions". The COSMOLOGY of Einstein's
General Theory of Relativity (1916), which proposes a four-dimensional
model of the Universe in which the notions of space and time are collapsed
into a single "spacetime continuum", offered considerable encouragement to
sf notions of a multidimensional Universe (or "multiverse"). Many modern
occultists and pseudoscientists have followed in the tracks of Johann
Zollner (1834-1882), author of Transcendental Physics (1865), who borrowed
mathematical notions to "justify" the idea of the "astral plane" beloved
by spiritualists and Theosophists. J.W. DUNNE used the notion to explain
prophetic dreams, eventually constructing a theory of the "Serial
Universe", and P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) built a more complex model of
the Universe in which time"moves" in a spiral and there are six spatial
dimensions.The possible dimensional limitations of human existence and
perception were dramatized by Edwin A. ABBOTT in Flatland (1884) as by "A
Square", which describes a world of two-dimensional beings, one of whom is
challenged to imagine our three-dimensional world - encouraging readers,
by analogy, to attempt to imagine a four-dimensional world. The challenge
was taken up by C.H. HINTON, whose many essays on the subject attempt to
"explain" ghosts and to imagine a four-dimensional God from whom nothing
in the human world can be hidden. In his story "An Unfinished
Communication" (1895) the afterlife involves freedom to move along the
time dimension ( TIME TRAVEL) to relive and reassess moments of life; he
also wrote a Flatland novel, An Episode of Flatland (1907). H.G. WELLS
borrowed Hintonian arguments to "explain" the working of the device in THE
TIME MACHINE (1895). The eponymous figure of E.V. ODLE's The Clockwork Man
(1923) could perceive many dimensions when working properly, but while
malfunctioning could do no more than flutter back and forth in time,
offering the merest hint of the quality of multidimensional life. Algernon
BLACKWOOD's "The Pikestaffe Case" (1924) attempts to evoke the
non-Euclidean geometry of a dimensional trap lurking within a mirror.Early
GENRE-SF writers who found the notion of dimensions fascinating included
Miles J. BREUER, most notably in "The Appendix and the Spectacles" (1928)
and"The Captured Cross-Section" (1929), and Donald WANDREI, notably in
"The Monster from Nowhere" (1935) and"Infinity Zero" (1936). In E.E."Doc"
SMITH's Skylark of Valeron (1934; 1949) the heroes briefly enter a
four-dimensional reality, and in Clifford D. SIMAK's "Hellhounds of the
Cosmos" (1932), 99 men enter the fourth dimension in a single grotesque
body to fight a four-dimensional monster. Henry KUTTNER's and C.L. MOORE's
classic "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (1943 as by Lewis Padgett) features
toys from the future which educate children into four-dimensional habits
of thought, but, like most stories of the period, this uses dimensional
trickery casually to tie up its plot with a neat knot.The mathematical
discipline of topology inspired several dimensional fantasies: Moebius
strips feature in Martin GARDNER's "No-Sided Professor" (1946) and "The
Island of Five Colours" (1952), Theodore STURGEON's "What Dead Men Tell"
(1949), Arthur C. CLARKE's "Wall of Darkness" (1949) and Homer NEARING
Jr's "The Hermeneutical Doughnut" (1954); Klein bottles and tesseracts
feature in "The Last Magician" (1951) by Bruce ELLIOTT, "And He Built a
Crooked House" (1941) by Robert A. HEINLEIN and "Star, Bright" (1952) by
Mark CLIFTON. Occam's Razor by David DUNCAN (1957) also deploys
topological jargon to shore up its dimensional speculations. George
GAMOW's popularization of ideas in modern physics, Mr Tompkins in
Wonderland (coll 1939), dramatizes certain odd situations very well
(although its contents are didactic essays rather than stories).The notion
that spaceships might make use of a fourth-dimensional HYPERSPACE in order
to evade the limiting velocity of light is very common in sf, having been
initially popularized by Isaac ASIMOV among others, but few stories
actually attempt to describe it; it is usually imagined as a chaotic
environment which utterly confuses the senses, as in Frederik POHL's "The
Mapmakers" (1955) and Clifford D. Simak's "All the Traps of Earth" (1960).
The dimensional chaos that might be associated with BLACK HOLES has
received closer attention, though these too are most often used as
"wormholes" permitting very long journeys to be taken more or less
instantaneously. Among the more effective representations of experience in
dimensionally distorted environments are Norman KAGAN's "The Mathenauts"
(1964), David I. MASSON's "Traveller's Rest" (1965) and Christopher
PRIEST's INVERTED WORLD (1974; vt The Inverted World US).In recent years
C.H. Hinton's ideas have been revived by Rudy RUCKER, who has used
dimensional mathematics very extravagantly in a number of his novels and
short stories, including the afterlife fantasy WHITE LIGHT (1980), the
comedy of fourth-dimensional intrusions The Sex Sphere (1983) and many of
the shorter pieces first published in The 57th Franz Kafka (coll 1983) and
reprinted, with others, in Transreal! (coll 1991). Rucker is the only
modern author to have answered "A Square's" challenge with authentic verve
and authority, but A.J. Dewdney's The Planiverse (1984) is an interesting
drama-documentary about a two-dimensional world whose topography recalls
Hinton's Flatland more than Abbott's.Relevant theme anthologies include
Fantasia Mathematica (anth 1958) and The Mathematical Magpie (anth 1962),
both ed Clifton Fadiman, and Science Fiction Adventures in Dimension (anth
1953) ed Groff CONKLIN. [BS]See also: INVASION.

DIOMEDE, JOHN K.
[s] George Alec EFFINGER.

DIOSCORIDES, Dr
Pieter HARTING.

DIRAC COMMUNICATOR
A device invented by James BLISH for the story "Beep" (1954; exp as The
Quincunx of Time 1973), and used by him also in other stories. It is an
instantaneous communicator, named after the great theoretical physicist
Paul Dirac (1902-1984). Others have since borrowed the device, but more
recently Ursula K. LE GUIN's ANSIBLE has been the communicator of
preference for sf writers. [PN]See also: FASTER THAN LIGHT.

DISASTER
Cataclysm, natural or manmade, is one of the most popular themes in sf.
Tales of future WAR and INVASION belong here, but for convenience are
dealt with under those separate headings. Stories which emphasize the
nature of the societies which spring up after a great disaster are dealt
with under HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.Central to the disaster tradition are
stories of vast biospheric changes which drastically affect human life.
Tales of universal floods are at least as old as The Epic of Gilgamesh
(c2000BC), and other motifs, such as plagues, fires and famines, have an
obvious source in the Bible, particularly the Revelation of St John (also
known as the Apocalypse, whence the adjective "apocalyptic", frequently
applied to this form of sf). Disaster stories appeal because they
represent everything we most fear and at the same time, perhaps, secretly
desire: a depopulated world, escape from the constraints of a highly
organized industrial society, the opportunity to prove one's ability as a
survivor. Perhaps because they represent a punishment meted out for the
hubris of technological Man, such stories have not been particularly
popular in the US sf magazines. The ideology of disaster stories runs
counter to the optimistic and expansionist attitudes associated with
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION and its long-time editor, John W. CAMPBELL Jr.
In fact, most examples of the type are from the UK, and it has been
suggested that this may be associated with the UK's decline as a world
power throughout the 20th century.However, some of the earliest examples
were written at the height of Empire. H.G. WELLS's "The Star" (1897) and
M.P. SHIEL's The Purple Cloud (1901; rev 1929) are both tales of
cataclysm. In the first a runaway star collides with the Earth, and in the
second a mysterious gas kills all but two people, a new Adam and Eve.
Arthur Conan DOYLE's The Poison Belt (1913) also features a gas, but in
this case it turns out not to be fatal. After WWI the disaster theme
became more common. J.J. CONNINGTON's Nordenholt's Million (1923) portrays
the social chaos following an agricultural blight caused by a mutation in
nitrogen-fixing bacteria. S. Fowler WRIGHT's Deluge (1928) and Dawn (1929)
depict the destruction of civilization by earthquakes and floods, and
subsequent attempts to build a new society. John COLLIER's Tom's A-Cold
(1933; vt Full Circle US) and Alun LLEWELLYN's The Strange Invaders (1934)
both deal effectively with survival in a post-holocaust world. R.C.
SHERRIFF's The Hopkins Manuscript (1939; rev vt The Cataclysm) depicts the
Moon's collision with Earth, and is a SATIRE on UK complacency in the face
of impending war.After WWII there was a resurgence, to an even higher
level, of the disaster theme. John WYNDHAM's The Day of the Triffids
(1951) is an enjoyable tale of a world in which all but a few have been
blinded and everyone is menaced by huge, poisonous plants. His The Kraken
Wakes (1953; vt Out of the Deeps US) is also a successful blend of
invasion and catastrophe themes: sea-dwelling aliens melt Earth's icecaps
and cause the inundation of the civilized world. The success of Wyndham's
novels inspired many emulators. The most distinguished was John
CHRISTOPHER, whose The Death of Grass (1956; vt No Blade of Grass US) is a
fine study of the breakdown of civilized values when a virus kills all
crops. The same author's The World in Winter (1962; vt The Long Winter US)
and A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965; vt The Ragged Edge US) are also
above-average works: one concerns a new Ice Age and the other features
earthquakes. Many other UK novelists have dealt in similar catastrophes;
e.g., J.T. MCINTOSH in One in Three Hundred (1954), John BOLAND in White
August (1955), Charles Eric MAINE in The Tide Went Out (1958; rev vt
Thirst! 1977), Edmund COOPER in All Fools' Day (1966), D.F. JONES in Don't
Pick the Flowers (1971; vt Denver is Missing US) and Kit PEDLER and Gerry
DAVIS in Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters * (1972). Keith ROBERTS's The
Furies (1966), D.G. COMPTON's The Silent Multitude (1966) and Richard
COWPER's The Twilight of Briareus (1974) combine disaster and invasion
themes in the Wyndham manner. Fred and Geoffrey HOYLE's The Inferno (1973)
deals with humanity's attempts to survive devastating cosmic
radiation.There have been several more personal uses of the disaster theme
by UK writers - studies in character and psychology rather than adventure
stories. An early example was John BOWEN's After the Rain (1958). More
impressive are J.G. BALLARD's examinations of human "collaborations" with
natural disasters: The Drowned World (1962 US), The Burning World (1964
US; rev vt The Drought UK) and THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1966), which concern the
psychological attractions of flooded, arid and crystalline landscapes.
Brian W. ALDISS's Greybeard (1964) is a well written tale of universal
sterility and the impending death of the human race. Several younger UK
writers, influenced by Aldiss and Ballard, have produced variations on the
cataclysmic theme: Charles PLATT in "The Disaster Story" (1966) and The
City Dwellers (1970), M. John HARRISON in The Committed Men (1971) and
Christopher PRIEST in Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972). John BRUNNER
has made strong admonitory use of the form in his novel of ecological
catastrophe, The Sheep Look Up (1972). Angela CARTER's HEROES AND VILLAINS
(1969) is a powerful love story set in the aftermath of a disaster, and
Doris LESSING's Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) is about a passive woman who
observes society's collapse from her window.US disaster novels are fewer
in number. Oddly enough, where UK writers reveal an obsession with the
weather, US writers show a strong concern for disease. Disastrous
epidemics feature in Jack LONDON's The Scarlet Plague (1915), George R.
STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949), Richard MATHESON's I Am Legend (1954),
Algis BUDRYS's Some Will Not Die (1961), Michael CRICHTON's The Andromeda
Strain (1969), Chelsea Quinn YARBRO's Time of the Fourth Horseman (1976)
and Stephen KING's THE STAND (cut from manuscript 1978; text largely
restored and rev 1990). Of these, Stewart's EARTH ABIDES is the
outstanding work, containing much sensitive description of landscape and
of the moral problems of the survivors. Other notable disaster stories by
US writers include The Second Deluge (1912) by Garrett P. SERVISS,
Darkness and Dawn (1914) by George Allan ENGLAND, When Worlds Collide
(1933) by Edwin BALMER and Philip WYLIE, Greener Than You Think (1947) by
Ward MOORE, "The XI Effect" (1950) by Philip LATHAM, Cat's Cradle (1963)
by Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, The Genocides (1965) by Thomas M. DISCH, "And Us,
Too, I Guess" (1973) by George Alec EFFINGER, The Swarm (1974) by Arthur
HERZOG and Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry
POURNELLE.Japanese sf seems to have a leaning towards disaster themes. Two
notable examples are Kobo A BE's Dai-Yon Kampyoki (1959; trans as Inter
Ice Age 4 1970 US) and Sakyo KOMATSU's Nippon Chinbotsu (1973; cut trans
as Japan Sinks 1976). The latter was filmed in 1973 as NIPPON CHINBOTSU
(vt The Submersion of Japan; vt Tidal Wave).Disaster is a popular motif in
sf in the CINEMA and on TELEVISION. Examples are the US film EARTHQUAKE
(1975) and the UK tv series SURVIVORS (1975-7). The disaster-movie boom in
the US took place in the 1960s and 1970s, and featured disasters both
domestic and sciencefictional; a producer associated with films of both
kinds was Irwin ALLEN. Another form is the MONSTER MOVIE (which
see).Curiously enough, although the 1980s were generally regarded as a
pessimistic decade, the disaster theme in sf seemed largely played out,
with only occasional books of any consequence. Among them were The Birth
of the People's Republic of Antarctica (1983) by John Calvin BATCHELOR,
which is an ironic account of civilization's collapse, James MORROW's THIS
IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS (1986), which puts survivors of a global
holocaust on trial, Greg BEAR's The Forge of God (1987), which has Earth
destroyed by alien machines, and David BRIN's Earth (1990), which has
Earth in danger of being swallowed up by a small BLACK HOLE at its core.
[DP/PN]See also: COSY CATASTROPHE; DYSTOPIAS; ECOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD;
ENTROPY; MUTANTS; NUCLEAR POWER; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM.

DISASTER IN TIME
(vt Grand Tour: Disaster in Time, vt Timescape) Made-for-tv movie (1991).
Channel Communications presents a Wild Street Pictures Production. Dir
David N.Twohy; prod John A. O'Connor; screenplay by Twohy, based on
"Vintage Season" (1946 ASF) by Lawrence O'Donnell (probably C.L. MOORE
writing solo); starring Jeff Daniels,Ariana Richards, Emilia Crow, George
Murdock. 99 mins (cut to 90). Colour.This is a classy little movie, quite
without pretension, based on the famous story of time-travelling tourists
from a future suffering from ennui, who stimulate themselves by attending
great disasters in the past. Daniels plays an innkeeper (he has lost his
wife in tragic circumstances) in a small New England town who is baffled
by his unusual guests; disaster (a meteor) strikes the nearby town, his
daughter Hilary (Ariana Richards) is subsequently killed,but his access to
the tourists' time-travelling device enables a replay of history during
which there are two innkeepers in the same time frame, and after which
things end well, maybe more than once. Adroit and intelligent, with a
pleasant sting in the tail. [PN]

DISCH, THOMAS M(ICHAEL)
(1940- ) US writer, raised in Minnesota but for many years intermittently
resident in New York where, before becoming a full-time writer in the
mid-1960s, he worked in an advertising agency and in a bank; he has
subsequently lived (and set several tales) in the UK, Turkey, Italy and
Mexico. He began publishing sf with "The Double-Timer" for Fantastic in
1962; much of his early work appears in One Hundred and Two H Bombs (coll
1966 UK; with 2 stories omitted and 2 added 1971 USA; with those 2 new
stories omitted along with 2 previous stories, and 7 new stories added vt
White Fang Goes Dingo and Other Funny SF Stories 1971 UK). "White Fang
Goes Dingo", which appears only in the first and third versions of the
collection, soon became TMD's second (and rather minor) novel, Mankind
Under the Leash (1965 Worlds of If as "White Fang Goes Dingo"; exp 1966
dos; vt The Puppies of Terra 1978 UK); in it ALIENS take over Earth and
make pets of mankind for aesthetic reasons. The hero, White Fang,
eventually drives the aliens off, but his feelings towards his period of
effortless slavery as a dancing pet remain ambivalent. The first version
of One Hundred and Two H Bombs, plus one of the stories added to the
second edition, plus Mankind Under the Leash under its vt The Puppies of
Terra, all appear in The Early Science Fiction Stories of Thomas M. Disch
(coll 1977) ed David G. HARTWELL.TMD's first novel, The Genocides (1965),
his most formidable early work, also involves alien manipulation of Earth
from a perspective indifferent (this time chillingly) to any human values
or priorities or conventions of storytelling; this sense of the
indifference of society or the Universe pervades his work, helping to
distinguish it from US sf in general, which remained fundamentally
optimistic about the relevance of human values through the 1960s. In The
Genocides the aliens seed Earth with enormous plants, in effect
transforming the planet into a monoculture agribusiness, an environment in
which it gradually becomes impossible for humans to survive. When groups
attempt to fight back, the aliens treat them as vermin, worms in the apple
of the planet; and, in one of the most chilling conclusions to any sf
novel published in the USA, fumigate them.Echo Round his Bones (1967) -
later assembled with The Genocides and Mankind Under the Leash as
Triplicity (omni 1980) - is another minor work, but CAMP CONCENTRATION
(1967 NW; 1968 UK) is TMD's most sustained sf invention, and represents
the highwater mark of his involvement with the UK NEW WAVE (he was one of
several Americans, including John T. SLADEK, to be strongly associated
with UK rather than US sf in the late 1960s). Told entirely in journal
form, CAMP CONCENTRATION recounts its narrator's experiences as an inmate
in a NEAR-FUTURE US concentration camp where the military has treated him
with Pallidine, a wonder drug which heightens human INTELLIGENCE but
causes death within months. Along with his fellow-inmates, the narrator
understands he is being used as a kind of self-destructing think tank,
experiencing the ecstasy of enhanced intelligence and the agonies of
"retribution" - the analogies with Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947
Sweden; trans 1948 US) are explicit - but his death is averted by a
trope-quoting sf climax which has been sharply criticized as a begging of
the issues raised.The next books were less weighty. Black Alice (1968)
with Sladek, writing together as Thom DEMIJOHN, though not sf is
reminiscent of both writers. The Prisoner * (1969) is a tie to the tv
series The PRISONER . Much of TMD's best work in the years around CAMP
CONCENTRATION is in shorter forms, most of the stories being assembled in
Under Compulsion (coll 1968 UK; vt Fun with Your New Head 1971 US) and
Getting into Death (coll 1973 UK), a title superseded by the superior US
edition, Getting into Death and Other Stories (coll 1976), which deletes 5
stories and adds 4. TMD's most famous single story, "The Asian Shore"
(1970), which appears in both versions of the collection, renders with
gripping verisimilitude the transmutation of a bourgeois Western man into
a lower-class urban Turk with family, through a process of possession.
Other notable stories from this period include "The Master of the Milford
Altarpiece" (1968), "Displaying the Flag" (1973) and "The Jocelyn Shrager
Story" (1975). Increasingly, during the 1970s, TMD's best work made use of
sf components (if at all) as background to stories of character; in much
of this work his protagonists are directly involved, whether or not
successfully, in the making of ART, and he increasingly devoted himself to
studies of the nature of the artist and of the world s/he attempts to
mould but which generally, crushingly, moulds her/him. From this period
date his first volumes of poetry (he writes much of his POETRY as "Tom
Disch"), the contents of which evince a sharp speculative clarity whose
roots are almost certainly generic. After Highway Sandwiches (coll 1970
chap), with Marilyn Hacker (1942- ) and Charles PLATT, and The Best Way to
Figure Plumbing (coll 1972), further work appeared in ABCDEFG HIJKLM
NPOQRST UVWXYZ (coll 1981 chap UK) (the ordering NPOQRST being sic), Burn
This (coll 1982 chap UK), Here I Am, There You Are, Where Were We? (coll
1984 chap UK), Yes, Let's: New and Selected Poems (coll 1989), and Dark
Verses and Light (coll 1991). Tom Disch is for many readers primarily a
poet whose connection with sf, if known, seems secondary.TMD's most
enduring single work of the 1970s is, however, sf. 334 (coll of linked
stories 1972 UK), possibly his best book, is set in a near-future
Manhattan; the stories, whose linkings are so subtle and elaborate that it
is possible - and probably desirable - to read the book as a novel, pivot
about the apartment building whose address (334 East 11th Street) is the
title of the book (the numbers 3,3,4 also serve as an arithmetical base [
OULIPO] for the design and proportions of the text). 334 comprises a
social portrait of urban life in about AD2025 in a New York where
existence has become even more difficult, intense and straitened than it
is now, and where the authorities treat humans no better than TMD's aliens
do; but the essence of the book lies in the patterns of survival achieved
by its numerous characters, whose aspirations and successes and failures
in this darkened urban world do not step over the bounds of what we may
expect will become normal experience. ON WINGS OF SONG (1979 UK) is
likewise set mainly in a near-future New York, and thematically sums up
most of the abiding concerns of TMD's career, as well as presenting an
exemplary portrait of the pleasures and miseries of art in a world made
barbarous by material scarcities and spiritual lassitude; in the final
analysis, however, it lacks the complex, energetic denseness of the
earlier book.By this point, he had in any case begun significantly to
lessen his production of sf. Neither his massive Gothic novel Clara Reeve
(1975) as by Leonie Hargrave - earlier, with Sladek, he had collaborated
on a more routine Gothic, The House that Fear Built (1966), the two
writing together as Cassandra Knye - nor Neighboring Lives (1981) with
Charles Naylor (1941- ), an historical analysis in fictional terms of
mid-19th-century English literary life, has any genre content. There
followed two collections of literate but significantly less engaged genre
work - FUNDAMENTAL DISCH (coll 1980; cut 1981 UK) and The Man who Had No
Idea (coll 1982 UK) - as well as The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984),
an intricately metaphysical horror novel. Its thematic partners - The MD:
A Horror Story (1991), a massive and ambitious exercise in the
supernatural whose conclusion takes place in a complexly devastated near
future; and The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994 UK), which savagely
satirizes the sexual hypocrises and obsessions of the modern Roman
Catholic Church through a plot involving pedophilia and doppelgangers -
mark only a partial return to the instrumental sf of his early work;
however, as a requiem for and an ethical indictment of the US this
century, it is as punishing as any of the more conspicuously radical works
from the beginning of his career. Amnesia (written and programed 1986) is
an engaging piece of interactive software. He is the author of two plays,
Ben Hur (produced 1989) and The Cardinal Detoxes (produced 1990; 1993
chap), the latter being the subject of a controversy instigated by the
Roman Catholic Church. TMD has been theatre critic for The Nation for
several years, with an intermission in 1991-2.His virtual departure from
sf may be not unconnected to the nature of the field's response to him.
Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distanced mannerism
of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the
fine cruelty of his wit, TMD has been perhaps the most respected, least
trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank sf writers.
He received the JOHN W. CAMPBELL MEMORIAL AWARD for ON WINGS OF SONG in
1980, but has otherwise gone relatively unhonoured by a field normally
over-generous with its kudos. [JC]Other works: Alfred the Great * (1969)
as by Victor Hastings, an associational film tie; Orders of the Retina
(coll 1982 chap), poetry; Ringtime: A Story (1983 chap); Torturing Mr
Amberwell (1985 chap); The Tale of Dan de Lion (1986 chap), a tale in
verse; The Brave Little Toaster (1981 Fantasy Annual IV; 1986 chap) and
The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1988 chap), juveniles; The Silver
Pillow: A Tale of Witchcraft (dated 1987 but 1988).As Editor: A series of
incisive theme anthologies of unusually high calibre, comprising The Ruins
of Earth (anth 1973), Bad Moon Rising (original anth 1973) and The New
Improved Sun: An Anthology of Utopian Science Fiction (anth 1975); two
additional anthologies with Charles Naylor, New Constellations (anth 1976)
and Strangeness (anth 1977).About the author: The American Shore:
Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch - Angouleme
(1978) by Samuel R. DELANY; A Tom Disch Checklist: Notes Toward a
Bibliography (1983 chap) by Chris DRUMM.See also: BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION
AWARD; CHILDREN IN SF; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DISASTER; DYSTOPIAS;
END OF THE WORLD; ENTROPY; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASY; GOTHIC SF; HORROR IN SF;
HUMOUR; INVASION; MATTER TRANSMISSION; MESSIAHS; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; NEW
WORLDS; OMNI; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; OVERPOPULATION; PHILIP K. DICK
AWARD; POLLUTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SEX; SUPERMAN; UTOPIAS; VENUS.

DISCOVERY AND INVENTION
These two topics are dealt with together because it is difficult to
separate them, the discovery of a new principle usually being followed by
the invention of a means of exploiting it. The discovery of new places is
dealt with in COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS and LOST WORLDS. Invention,
too, is discussed in other entries, including IMAGINARY SCIENCE, MACHINES,
POWER SOURCES, PREDICTION, TECHNOLOGY and TRANSPORTATION.The invention
story was prominent in 19th-century sf, notably in the works of Jules
VERNE, who could almost be said to have invented it. Vernean inventions,
particularly of new kinds of transport, were a feature of DIME-NOVEL SF.
Yankee knowhow and inventiveness were carried into the past with Mark
TWAIN's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). (A modern
version of Twain's story, with a more sophisticated view of HISTORY, is
LEST DARKNESS FALL [1941] by L. Sprague DE CAMP.) Edward Everett HALE
invented orbital satellites in "The Brick Moon" (1869). Later in the
century the US inventor Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) became a hero
figure; his exploits were much imitated in sf, and his name often borrowed
( EDISONADE); some of these stories are also described under SCIENTISTS.
Rudyard KIPLING invented the transatlantic airmail postal service in "With
the Night Mail" (1905). H.G. WELLS invented a huge number of devices -
some fantastic, as in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), and some realistic, as with
the tanks in "The Land Ironclads" (1903) and atomic war in The World Set
Free (1914). Samuel CHAPMAN's Doctor Jones' Picnic (1898) features a busy
inventor who creates a huge aluminium BALLOON and a homoeopathic cure for
cancer. The index of Everett F. BLEILER's Science-Fiction: The Early Years
(1990) lists 134 stories and novels according to their particular
inventions, those for "g" being "gasoline substitute, ghost condensor,
gravity storage apparatus, gunpowder engine"; other letters of the
alphabet produce examples just as eccentric.The invention story had an
especially strong vogue in the early PULP MAGAZINES, where it was equalled
in popularity as an sf subject only by the future- WAR story and the
lost-race story. Examples are: George Allan ENGLAND's The Golden Blight
(1912 Cavalier; 1916), in which a gold-disintegrator effects economic
revolution; William Wallace COOK's The Eighth Wonder (1906-7 Argosy;
1925), in which an eccentric inventor threatens to steal the world's
electricity supply with a huge electromagnet; and Garrett P. SERVISS's The
Moon Metal (1900), in which a MATTER TRANSMITTER is invented to obtain
artemisium, a rare valuable metal, from the Moon.The years 1900-30 were
largely those of scientific OPTIMISM, and in the pulps Hugo GERNSBACK was
one of its prophets. Before founding AMAZING STORIES he did well with his
magazine SCIENCE AND INVENTION, which featured much technological fiction.
His own Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12 Modern Electrics; fixup 1925) is one of
the most celebrated of those novels whose raison d'etre is to catalogue
the inventions of the future; they include tv.The discovery/invention
story continued to pop up every now and then outside GENRE SF, as in C.S.
FORESTER's The Peacemaker (1934), in which a pacifist invents a magnetic
disrupter which stops machinery; E.C. LARGE's Sugar in the Air (1937), in
which a process for artificial photosynthesis is discovered; and William
GOLDING's play The Brass Butterfly (1956 as "Envoy Extraordinary"; 1958),
in which a brilliant inventor in ancient Greece is given short shrift by
his ruler, who sees the new inventions as an unpleasing threat to the
status quo. But it was inside genre sf that the invention story found its
true home, though tending to become more sombre when the central metaphor
of Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818) - the inventor being destroyed by
his creation - was given contemporary relevance by the dropping of the
atom bomb over Hiroshima. Even before that, stories featuring NUCLEAR
POWER, such as Lester DEL REY's "Nerves" (1942), had been very much aware
of the dangers of such inventions. John W. CAMPBELL Jr, both as a writer
and as editor of ASF, was taking a gloomier view of technological advance
by the late 1930s, although his own The Mightiest Machine (1934 ASF; 1947)
had been a jolly romp, featuring the invention of a SPACESHIP which can
take its energy direct from the stars. Campbell's ASF continued through
the 1940s to publish a number of invention stories, in which scientific
plausibility was emphasized as never before in genre sf. The results
included Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Waldo" (1942 ASF as by Anson MacDonald; vt
Waldo: Genius in Orbit 1958). This is a gripping, optimistic invention
story; the term WALDO is still used today for remote-control devices.
George O. SMITH's Venus Equilateral stories (ASF 1942-5; coll as Venus
Equilateral 1947) feature much inventive work in radio COMMUNICATIONS
across the Solar System. ASF's invention syndrome was given a boost by
James BLISH's Okie stories, which feature the SPINDIZZY, one of the most
attractive of all sf inventions; they appeared 1950-54, and in book form
as the first 2 vols of the Cities in Flight tetralogy: Earthman, Come Home
(1955) and They Shall Have Stars (1956 UK; vt Year 2018! US). ASF
sometimes struck a lighter note vis-a-vis inventions, notably in the
Galloway Gallegher stories (1943-8) by Lewis Padgett (Henry KUTTNER).
These feature an inventor whose creative faculties are released by the
intake of large quantities of alcohol, and his irritating robot sidekick;
they were collected as Robots Have No Tails (coll of linked stories 1952)
as by Kuttner. Meanwhile ASF's competitors were also featuring
lighthearted invention stories alongside the more doom-laden variety. A
notable example of the former was the Lancelot Biggs series of SPACE
OPERAS by Nelson S. BOND, which appeared mostly in Fantastic Adventures
(1939-40) and were collected in revised form as Lancelot Biggs: Spaceman
(coll of linked stories 1950). Biggs, the thin genius who bumbles around
but gets there in the end, is typical of sf's more stereotyped inventors.
Many other relevant genre-sf stories are collected in Science Fiction
Inventions (anth 1967) ed Damon KNIGHT.Many famous sf discoveries have
been made through a process of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and about 40 of
them are discussed under that rubric. One in particular is worthy of
attention here: "Noise Level" (1952) by Raymond F. JONES. In this tale,
which in its emphasis on the potential power of the human mind sums up the
whole ethos of Campbell's ASF, a counterfeit invention is the occasion of
conceptual breakthrough. A group of scientists are shown an apparently
bona fide film of an ANTIGRAVITY device, the inventor of which has been
killed. In their attempt to duplicate it they break through to a new
understanding of physics, only to discover that the original was a fraud,
the stratagem having been devised to exert psychological pressure on them
to rethink their worldviews.Discovery/invention themes still proliferate
in sf, as by the nature of the genre they always will. Important examples
from the 1950s onward have been: Fred HOYLE's Ossian's Ride (1959), in
which a sinister-seeming cartel has cordoned off southwest Ireland as an
invention-producing area; Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963), in which
havoc is wreaked by a newly discovered form of ice which freezes
everything it touches; Isaac ASIMOV's THE GODS THEMSELVES (1972), in which
a new energy source, the positron pump, is invented with a great show of
plausibility; and Bob SHAW's Other Days, Other Eyes (fixup 1972), based on
his short story "Light of Other Days" (1966), which features "slow glass",
one of the most convincing and original inventions of sf (it slows down
light, thus effectively allowing events to be viewed after a time-lapse;
the privacy-invading social consequences are intriguingly explored).
Arthur C. CLARKE's Fountains of Paradise (1979), a classically optimistic
work of technological invention, envisages the building in a NEAR-FUTURE
Earth of a 36,000km (22,400 mile) tower to be used as a space elevator.One
of the most interesting subthemes, which has persisted strongly into the
1990s, is found in stories relating the discoveries of ALIEN artefacts,
very often with a subsequent desire to exploit them. Some, such as A.E.
VAN VOGT's "A Can of Paint" (1944) and Robert SHECKLEY's "One Man's
Poison" (1953; vt "Untouched by Human Hands") and "Hands Off" (1954), are
basically comedies about the dangers of the incomprehensible ("One Man's
Poison" contains the line "I don't eat anything that giggles"). But the
theme has serious ramifications, too. Such stories often create a tension
between the longing and wonder aroused by the thought that we are not
alone, together with a sense of despair at the ambiguity of such objects
and the doubt whether they will ever be understood. Such is Arthur C.
Clarke's "Sentinel of Eternity" (1951; vt "The Sentinel"), the basis for
the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968); the story tells of the discovery of
a strange monolith on the Moon. Clarke's RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973) is
entirely devoted to the exploration of, and failure to fully comprehend, a
vast, apparently unmanned spaceship which enters the Solar System ( BIG
DUMB OBJECTS). The psychological repercussions of Man's inability to
comprehend the alien are well explored in Frederik POHL's GATEWAY (1977),
where abandoned alien spaceships are discovered and used, but not
understood; the reaching out so symbolized is obsessive, seductive and
murderous.GATEWAY and the subsequent novels in Pohl's Heechee series are
sociologically almost the reverse of the ASF stories referred to above,
perhaps reflecting the lowering of self-esteem and morale in the West from
the late 1960s onward. Whereas ASF published tales of human ingenuity
conquering the unknown, Pohl's stories envisage humanity as bewildered by
the discovery of superior technology in much the same way as Bushmen in
our own world might be baffled by the products of the industrial West. The
metaphor for this in Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI's novella "Piknik na
obochine" (1972; trans as "Roadside Picnic" in Roadside Picnic/Tale of the
Troika, coll 1977) is of humans discovering enigma as they scrabble like
rats through trash left by alien picnickers. The theme, not always so
pessimistically expressed, is common in the sophisticated new wave of
1980s space opera as represented by authors like Greg BEAR and Paul J.
MCAULEY, and also by Charles SHEFFIELD's Divergence (1991). A GOTHIC-SF
variant of the theme appears in the malign consequences of the discovery
of a long-buried alien spacecraft on Earth in Stephen KING's The
Tommyknockers (1987). [PN]

DiSILVESTRO, ROGER L.
(1949- ) US writer whose first novel of genre interest was Ursula's Gift
(1988), a humorous fantasy. His second, Living with the Reptiles (1990),
spoofs the ethical tomfooleries of that form of the TIME-TRAVEL tale in
which the protagonist changes history to save/destroy/play with the
future. In this case the protagonists, after acquiring the necessary
equipment in what remains of the Amazon jungle, pass into the 9th century,
where shenanigans are soon afoot. [JC]

DISINTEGRATOR
In sf TERMINOLOGY, one of the commonest items of the sf armoury (
WEAPONS), especially in SPACE OPERA of the 1930s and 1940s. The device may
have been a product of squeamishness-or perhaps just neatness - since it
creates a maximum of destruction with a minimum of bleeding pieces left to
sweep up afterwards. The disintegrator first reached a wide audience with
the COMIC strip BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY in 1935, as a result of
which toy disintegrators were very popular with kids in the late 1930s.
[PN]

DISRAELI, BENJAMIN
(1804-1881) UK novelist and statesman, MP from 1837 and, in 1868 and
again 1874-80, Prime Minister. He became Lord Beaconsfield. His
almost-forgotten youthful novel The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828;
published anon) has an innocent savage from a South Seas UTOPIA voyaging
to an imaginary country closely resembling a satirized England. Modern sf
normally uses actual ALIENS rather than savages as their innocent
observers in books of this kind, but the principle is the same. BD
features RECURSIVELY in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK) by Bruce STERLING
and William GIBSON. [PN]

DITMAR AWARDS
AWARDS.

DIXIE, [Lady] FLORENCE (CAROLINE)
(1855-1905) UK traveller and writer whose nonfiction Across Patagonia
(1880) captures something of her FEMINIST urgency. In Gloriana, or The
Revolution of 1900 (1890) a woman disguised as a man is elected Prime
Minister of the UK and, though unmasked, establishes full equality between
the sexes; by 1999, a woman-ruled UK beneficently dominates its Federated
Empire. Isola, or The Disinherited: A Revolt for Women and All the
Disinherited (1903), a play, depicts the coming to UTOPIAN plenitude of
the society of Saxcoberland on the planet Erth, which is similar but not
identical to Earth. [JC]About the author: Victorian Women Travel Writers
(1982) by Catherine Barnes Stevenson.

DIXON, CHARLES
UK writer, problematically identified as Charles Dixon (1858-1926), an
ornithologist of some renown. The sf novel written by him or some other CD
is Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour (1895), a boys' tale featuring the
interplanetary exploits of some young protagonists who travel to MARS via
an electric SPACESHIP. [JC]

DIXON, DOUGAL
(1947- ) UK writer whose After Man: A Zoology of the Future (1981) and
Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future (1990) provide quasifactual
views of a FAR-FUTURE Earth in which Homo sapiens, having exhausted the
planet, soon becomes extinct, giving way (in a fashion reminiscent of the
work of Olaf STAPLEDON) to succeeding forms of life. Similarly couched in
a TIME-TRAVEL framework, but less taxing in its assumptions, is a Byron
PREISS tie, Time Machine #7: Ice Age Explorer * (1985). [JC]See also:
EVOLUTION.

DIXON, FRANKLIN W.
Harriet S. ADAMS.

DIXON, ROGER
(1930- ) UK accountant and writer whose epic adventure about humankind's
future fate, Noah II (1970 US; rev 1975 UK), is based on a story idea by
RD and his agent, Basil Bova, and began the aborted Quest series. A second
novel, The Cain Factor (1975) as by Charles Lewis, mixes SEX and
apocalypse as a man and a woman escape a post- HOLOCAUST Earth to become
the ADAM AND EVE of a new planet. [JC]See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS;
SPACESHIPS.

DIXON, THOMAS
(1864-1946) US writer whose The Fall of the Nation (1915-16 National
Sunday Magazine; 1916) graphically depicts the conquest of the USA by the
Imperial Confederation of Europe, dominated by Germany. After years of
occupation, a singularly ferocious US womanhood helps the men of the USA
expel the enemy. [JC]See also: INVASION.

DOBLIN, ALFRED
[r] GERMANY.

DOCKWEILER, JOSEPH H.
[r] Dirk WYLIE.

DOC SAVAGE
US PULP MAGAZINE, pulp-size Mar 1933-Dec 1943, DIGEST-size Jan
1944-Sep/Oct 1948, pulp-size Winter 1948-Summer 1949. 181 issues Mar
1933-Summer 1949. Monthly until Feb 1947, then 4 bimonthly issues, then
quarterly from Winter 1948. Published by STREET & SMITH; ed John NANOVIC
1933-43. DS was perhaps the best of the sf-oriented pulp-hero magazines.
Each issue had a novel published under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson, and
many contained short adventure stories as well; a considerable majority of
the novels were the work of Lester DENT (whom see, and especially ROBESON
for further Doc Savage details). The most usual sf elements were
superscientific WEAPONS and visits to LOST WORLDS; TELEPORTATION featured
once. A master SCIENTIST, almost superhuman in intelligence and strength,
Doc Savage was actually Clark Savage, the "Man of Bronze"- the surname is
a Street & Smith homage to Colonel Richard Henry Savage, an early
contributor to the firm's journals; the given name is from Clark Gable.
The success of the series led to imitations, most notably SUPERMAN, whose
debt to DS is evident in his name - Clark Kent, the "Man of Steel".
[FHP/MJE]

DOC SAVAGE: THE MAN OF BRONZE
Film (1975). Warner Bros. Dir Michael Anderson, starring Ron Ely, Paul
Wexler. Screenplay George PAL, Joseph Morheim based on "The Man of Bronze"
(1933) by Kenneth ROBESON. 100 mins. Colour.There were 181 novels in DOC
SAVAGE MAGAZINE, and at one point producer George Pal announced that he
hoped to film them all, but this, based on the first of them, was a flop.
Muscular superscientist hero Doc fights with a villain over a fountain of
liquid gold owned by a remote tribe in South America. The sf elements are
very marginal. The film is treated in a joky manner reminiscent of the
1966-8 Batman tv series, but Anderson, who later made the disappointing
LOGAN'S RUN (1976), is too ponderous a director to carry off this sort of
camp nostalgia with flair. It was not until Steven SPIELBERG's Raiders of
the Lost Ark (1981) that the ambience of the sf/adventure pulps was
recreated with the right mixture of respect and amusement. [PN/JB]

DR CYCLOPS
Film (1940). Paramount. Dir Ernest B. Schoedsack, starring Albert Dekker,
Janice Logan, Thomas Coley, Charles Halton. Screenplay Tom Kilpatrick. 75
mins. Colour.A mad scientist in the Peruvian jungle is using radioactivity
to miniaturize living things, and shrinks some US explorers who find his
laboratory to an average height of 12in (30cm). Made by the director of
KING KONG (1933), DC is a fast-paced, visually inventive film (though the
dialogue is leaden), largely taken up by desperate efforts to survive a
series of perils. Dekker's portrayal of the ruthless Dr Thorkel - shaven
head, bulky body, thick-lensed glasses - as the "god" toying sadistically
with his little creations before casually destroying them is truly
menacing; whether by design or accident, he resembles what was to become
the caricature of the "beastly Jap" during WWII. The illusion of
miniaturization-supervised by Farciot Edouart, one of the innovators in
that area of trick photography - is very convincing. The novelization, Dr
Cyclops * (1940), was published under the house name Will GARTH, and was
probably the work of Alexander SAMALMAN. [JB/PN]See also: GREAT AND SMALL.

DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE
1. Film (1932). Paramount. Prod and dir Rouben Mamoulian, starring
Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart. Screenplay Samuel Hoffenstein,
Percy Heath, based on Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by
Robert Louis STEVENSON. 98 mins, cut to 90 mins, cut to 81 mins. B/w.While
Stevenson's suggestion is that civilization may be only skin-deep, his
tale of a decent, prim society doctor, Dr Jekyll, who transforms himself
with a new drug into the brutal libertine, Mr Hyde, does not exactly
abandon the religious concept of original sin; it does, however, reconcile
it with 19th-century scientific thought, calling on Darwin (humanity's
animal heritage) and prefiguring Freud (the id sometimes overwhelming the
ego). Silent film versions (made in 1908, 1910, 1912, 1913 and three in
1920) were usually taken from one of the several melodramatic stage
productions rather than directly from the original novel, and tended to
present Hyde (as in the 1920 version played by John Barrymore) as a
caricature of evil - that is, as a victim of his own Original Sin.In
Mamoulian's 1932 version, which remains the most interesting, Hyde's
appearance is almost that of Neanderthal Man ( APES AND CAVEMEN), and his
joyfully ferocious behaviour results not from inherent evil but from
uncontrollable primitive drives. The most compelling of these is sexual -
this is one of the classic loci of the theme of SEX in sf - though as the
film progresses it is accompanied by an increasing capacity for cruelty.
All this comments, apparently deliberately, on the repressed society in
which Jekyll has been reared. The film, atmospheric and convincing, is an
acknowledged classic, especially famous for the heartbeats on the
soundtrack and the convincing transformation scenes. When re-released
after the Hollywood Production Code was established in 1934, it had 10
minutes cut (sexual censorship), seldom restored since.2. Film (1941).
MGM. Dir Victor Fleming, starring Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman.
Screenplay John Lee Mahin. 127 mins. B/w.Growing pressures of censorship
took some of the sexual edge from this glossy remake and, although the
film is still gripping - largely because of Bergman's appealing
vulnerability as the tart - it seems bland after the raw energy of
Mamoulian's version.3. Subsequent film versions - including The Two Faces
of Dr Jekyll (1960; vt House of Fright US), which had a plain Jekyll
turning into a handsome Hyde, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1967), a made-for-tv film, I, Monster (1970), Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde
(1971), where Martine Beswick plays Hyde as a woman in a film seemingly
designed for fetishists, The Man with Two Heads (1972; vt Dr Jekyll and Mr
Blood), Dr Black and Mr Hyde (1975) and Docteur Jekyll et les femmes
(1981; vt The Blood of Dr Jekyll), a particularly perverse version dir
Walerian Borowczyk - have simply been variations of the formula, some more
ingenious than others, but none with the impact of the 1932 production.
[PN/JB]

DR. M
Film (1989). NEF Filmproduktion/Ellepi Film/Clea Productions. Dir Claude
Chabrol, starring Alan Bates, Jennifer Beals, Jan Niklas, Hanns Zischler.
Screenplay Sollace Mitchell from a story by Thomas Bauermeister, inspired
by Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (1920 ; trans Lilian A. Clare as Dr.Mabuse,
Master of Mystery1923 UK) by Norbert Jacques (1880-1954). 116 mins.
Colour.Although in clear homage to Fritz LANG's three Dr Mabuse films ( DR
MABUSE, DER SPIELER), this German, Italian and French coproduction is not
Langian in style. An epidemic of suicides in a NEAR-FUTURE Berlin,
investigated by detectives from both East (Zischler) and West (Niklas), is
connected to the Theratos holiday camps whose mysterious owner (the
"Mabuse" figure, Marsfeldt, played by Bates) has been conditioning
holiday-makers by hypnosis to kill themselves, his thesis being that death
is fundamentally what we all crave. Marsfeldt, a perversely charming
philosopher surviving thanks to a life-support system, has wide media
holdings and intends to brainwash the whole of Berlin into oblivion via a
tv broadcast. This sophisticated film focuses on the dream-like quality of
a world dominated by media images and on the difficulty of locating any
firm reality within it. [PN]

DR MABUSE, DER SPIELER
(vt Dr Mabuse, the Gambler) Film (1922). Ullstein/UCO Film/Decla
Bioscop/UFA. Dir Fritz LANG, starring Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Alfred Abel, Aud
Egede Nissen, Gertrud Welcker, Bernhard Goetzke. Screenplay Thea VON
HARBOU, loosely based onDoktor Mabuse, der Spieler (1920; trans Lilian A.
Clare as Dr.Mabuse, Master of Mystery). In 2 parts, 95 mins and 100 mins.
B/W.Although on the face of it just a sensational melodrama about a
ruthless businessman/scientist intent on world gangsterism, this film
anticipates several 20th-century sf themes, both written and filmed. It
pictures a Germany sinking into anarchy and corruption, ready to be
exploited by a man-more of an evil genius - to whom chaos is almost an end
in itself. Mabuse (Klein-Rogge) has strong hypnotic powers and can summon
visions to control the weak. The DYSTOPIA depicted looks forward to any
number of sf books and films. The chaos-lover whose weapons are as much
psychological as technological seems to anticipate, for example, the
novels of Alfred BESTER. The idea of a decaying society controlled and
exploited by a secret group - the essence of cultural PARANOIA - appears
throughout sf, often in the early novels of C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederik
POHL, for example. The film shows how artistically potent the themes of
pulp fiction can be when distilled and concentrated, and imaged with such
ferocity. In Part One, Ein Bild der Zeit ["An Image of our Time"], Mabuse
and his web of henchmen penetrate and corrupt society at all levels. In
Part Two, Inferno - Menschen der Zeit ["Inferno - Men of our Time"],
Mabuse becomes wholly mad and is incarcerated in an asylum. Lang, who went
on to make the sf films METROPOLIS (1926) and Die FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt
The Woman in the Moon), also made two Mabuse sequels, Das Testament des Dr
Mabuse (1933; vt The Testament of Dr Mabuse) and Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR
MABUSE (1960; vt The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse; vt The Diabolical Dr
Mabuse). In the early 1960s five further Mabuse films were made in
Germany, not by Lang. [PN]See also: DR. M.

DR MABUSE THE GAMBLER
DR MABUSE, DER SPIELER.

DR NO
Film (1962). Eon/United Artists. Dir Terence Young, starring Sean
Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord. Screenplay Richard
Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, Berkely Mather, based on Dr No (1958) by Ian
FLEMING. 105 mins. Colour.This UK film was the first in the hugely
successful James Bond series, at first loosely based on Fleming's novels
and later featuring original stories. The villain, whose cinematic
forebears include Fu Manchu, Captain Nemo and METROPOLIS's Rotwang - like
Rotwang, Dr No possesses mechanical hands - attempts to blackmail the USA,
working from a remote Caribbean island, by deflecting its Cape Canaveral
rockets off course. UK secret agent Bond brings his plans to an end by
boiling him in a pool containing an atomic reactor. DN's mordant humour,
its sexism, its visual flashiness and the foiled attempt by a supervillain
to rule the world with a superscientific device set the pattern for the
entire series, most of which are marginally sf in the pulp-adventure
manner of Doc Savage ( DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE). The two most obviously
sciencefictional sequels are YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) and MOONRAKER
(1979). [JB]See also: CINEMA.

DOCTOROW, E(DGAR) L(AURENCE)
(1931- ) US writer who remains best known for Ragtime (1975), a novel
that evokes the past with an hallucinatory power which edges its real-life
and fictional characters into a fable-like milieu ( FABULATION). His first
sf novel, Big as Life (1966), depicts satirically what happens in New York
when enormous beings suddenly appear in the city streets; The Waterworks
(1994), set in a STEAMPUNK version of the 19th century city, is an
intricate tale of conspiracy and SUSPENDED ANIMATION [JC]

DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING...
Full title: Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb Film (1963). Hawk/Columbia. Prod and dir Stanley KUBRICK,
starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn,
Slim Pickens. Screenplay Kubrick, Terry Southern (1924- ), Peter GEORGE,
based on Two Hours to Doom (1958; vt Red Alert US) by Peter Bryant
(pseudonym of Peter George). 94 mins. B/w.This, the first of Kubrick's
three sf films, has worn well, with its curious blend of black comedy,
documentary realism and almost poetic homage to the very machines (B-52s
and their nuclear cargo) that he shows as destroying the world. The
original novel was a serious story about an insane US general who launches
a pre-emptive attack on Russia without presidential authority, but Kubrick
opted for a grotesquely satirical and very funny treatment, helped by a
strong cast including Peter Sellers, who plays three roles: one is Dr
Strangelove, a sinister ex-Nazi, generally seen as burlesquing a
distinguished real-life SCIENTIST. The appalling point of the film is the
way the vision of Armageddon attracts the very protagonists whose job it
is to prevent it: Strangelove is sexually aroused by the idea of cleansing
HOLOCAUST, and it excites the lunatic general and even the bomber pilot
(Pickens), who rides his own bomb down with Texan whoops of triumph. At
the end of the movie Vera Lynn's voice rises plangently into "We'll Meet
Again" as the screen is covered with mushroom clouds. The novelization is
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb *
(1963) by Peter George.The film received the 1965 HUGO for Best Dramatic
Presentation. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA.

DOCTOR WHO
UK tv series (1963- ). BBC TV. Created by Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson.
1st-season prod Verity Lambert, story editor David Whitaker; the Doctor
played by William Hartnell Nov 1963-Oct 1966. 26 seasons to date, 695
episodes to Dec 1989, mostly 25 mins per episode. Seasons 1-6 b/w;
subsequent seasons colour.In this longest-running UK sf tv series for
children, the Doctor, generally known as Dr Who because of the show's
enigmatic title (it is not actually his name), eventually revealed as a
Time Lord, travels back and forth in time and space; he is accompanied by
various people (sometimes children, sometimes men, usually young women),
in his TIME MACHINE, the TARDIS, an acronym for Time and Relative
Dimensions in Space. Stories have varied in length from 1 to 14 episodes,
the most common length through 1974 being 6 episodes, and subsequently
4.The first episode (Nov 1963) concerned a young girl who puzzles two of
her schoolteachers with her unusual knowledge of history. They follow her
into what appears to be a police telephone box but is in fact a time
machine (whose interior is many times larger than its exterior) owned by
her irritable and eccentric grandfather, the Doctor. As the machine cannot
be properly controlled they are all whisked off to the Stone Age, where
they remain for the following 3 episodes.The series had a modest following
at first; it was not until the second story, The Dead Planet, written by
Terry NATION, that it achieved mass popularity, mainly because of the
introduction of the DALEKS. Until 1990 the series returned to UK tv every
year; it was not introduced to US tv until the Tom Baker episodes that
were played there in 1982, when it quickly developed a cult following.(A
previous attempt in the 1970s to export the programme to the USA - a
package of the Jon Pertwee episodes - had flopped.)Because the Doctor has
the ability periodically to regenerate his entire body, the series has
been able to outlast its original star, the crusty William Hartnell, and
to introduce a succession of new leading men: Patrick Troughton (Nov
1966-June 1969), Jon Pertwee (Jan 1970-June 1974), Tom Baker (Dec 1974-Mar
1981), Peter Davison (Jan 1982-Mar 1984), Colin Baker (Mar 1984-Dec 1986)
and Sylvester McCoy (Sep 1987 onwards). Peter Cushing took the role in two
films, DR WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965) and DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D.
(1966); Richard Hurndall took the place of the late Hartnell in The Five
Doctors (1983); and Michael Jayston played the Doctor's evil incarnation
from the future in the 14-episode The Trial of a Time Lord (1986).While
the b/w episodes featuring Hartnell and Troughton are spikier and
stranger, the show probably hit its peak between the Pertwee and Davison
versions, with Tom Baker's long-lived, Harpo-Marxish Time Lord the most
popular of all and the writers of the 1970s gradually revealing more of
the secrets of the Time Lords that had been hinted at since the first. In
the late 1980s the show lost direction (some say thanks to the tiredness
of John Nathan-Turner's regime as producer, begun Aug 1980) and the BBC
experimented with it - lengthening it, moving it from its long-established
Saturday teatime slot to a weekday, and, finally, putting it on an
indefinite suspension where, neither cancelled nor renewed, it remains as
of 1994.A 30th anniversary tv programme planned for 1993 was shelved at
the last minute, though there was a Doctor Who radio drama in 1993. While
early seasons were 10 months long, in the 1970s most seasons were 6-7
months, and from 1982 they were 3 months.Although the programme has long
since settled into a pattern, with stories usually featuring at least one
monster, there has been plenty of room for experiment. The authors have
unblushingly pirated hundreds of ideas from PULP-MAGAZINE sf, but often
make intelligent and sometimes quite complex use of them. It seems
probable that, certainly in the 1970s, the programme attracted as many
adult viewers as children. With the increasing sophistication of the
scripts and the expertise of the special effects and make-up - from which
many other programmes could learn a great deal about what can be done on a
low budget - DW became a notably self-confident series, juggling expertly
with many of the great tropes and images of the genre. It is the most
successful SPACE OPERA in the history of tv, not excluding STAR TREK.
Storylines often feature political SATIRE. At its worst merely silly, at
its best it has been spellbinding.Other notable cast members over the
years have included Carole Ann Ford (the Doctor's granddaughter), Frazer
Hines (Jamie), Anneke Wills (Polly), Michael Craze (Ben), Deborah Watling
(Victoria), Wendy Padbury (Zoe), Nicholas Courtney (the Brigadier), Katy
Manning (Jo), Roger Delgado (the Doctor's great enemy, the Master),
Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane), Louise Jameson (Leela), John Leeson (the
voice of K-9, the Doctor's robot dog, one of the most successful of the
media's cute ROBOTS), Mary Tamm (Romana), Lalla Ward (the regenerated
Romana), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Janet Fielding (Tegan), Nicola Bryant
(Peri), Anthony Ainley (the Master again), Bonnie Langford (Mel) and
Sophie Aldred (Ace). Producers of the series after Verity Lambert (who
lasted into the 3rd season) have included Innes Lloyd, Peter Bryant, Barry
Letts, Philip Hinchcliffe, Graham Williams and John Nathan-Turner. Story
editors, all of whom have written episodes, have included Dennis Spooner,
Gerry DAVIS, Derrick Sherwin, Terrance Dicks (1968-74), Robert Holmes,
Anthony Read, Douglas ADAMS, Christopher H. Bidmead, Eric Saward (1982-6)
and Andrew Cartmell. Other writers have included Terry Nation, David
Whitaker, John Lucarotti, Brian Hayles, Kit PEDLER, Malcolm Hulke, Don
Houghton, Robert Sloman, Bob Baker and Dave Martin, Robert Banks Stewart,
David Fisher, Stephen GALLAGHER, Johnny Byrne, Terence Dudley, Peter
Grimwade, Pip and Jane Baker, and Ben Aaronovitch.There are now very many
spin-off books from the series, ranging from episode guides through
annuals, encyclopedias, scholarly studies and published scripts to a
TARDIS cookbook. There is a magazine, Dr Who Monthly, with more than 160
issues. All but four stories have now been novelized, with 151 titles
published from the 1970s through late 1990. (The un-novelized scripts are
"The Pirate Planet"by Douglas Adams, "City of Death" by Douglas Adams and
Graham Williams writing as David Agnew, "Resurrection of the Daleks" by
Eric Saward and "Revelation of the Daleks"by Eric Saward. In 1991, most
existing scripts having been novelized, a post-tv sequence of releases,
The New Doctor Who Adventures, was instituted, the first sequence being
the Timewyrm series: Timewyrm: Genesys * (1991) by John Peel, Exodus *
(1991) by Terrance Dicks, Apocalypse * (1991) by Nigel Robinson and
Revelation * (1991) by Paul Cornell. A comprehensive Doctor Who
bibliography would itself be book-size. [JB/PN/KN]See also: SHARED WORLDS;
STEAMPUNK.

DR WHO AND THE DALEKS
Film (1965). AARU. Dir Gordon Flemyng, starring Peter Cushing, Roy
Castle, Jenny Linden, Roberta Tovey. Screenplay Milton Subotsky, based on
the second DR WHO tv story, 1963-4, the 7-episode The Dead Planet by Terry
NATION. 85 mins. Colour.Dr Who - played colourlessly by Cushing as a
polite old man - is inadvertently taken to a dying planet with his
granddaughters and an accident-prone young man (Castle) as a result of the
latter falling onto the controls of the Doctor's time-and-space machine,
the Tardis. They find a city occupied by DALEKS about to wipe out their
ancient human enemies, the Thals, with a neutron bomb; despite their
fierceness the Daleks prove ridiculously easy to immobilize. DWATD shows
something about the 1960s in having Dr Who, famous in later incarnations
as a crafty expert in nonviolent resolution of conflict, hawkishly urging
the pacifist Thals to war. This crudely made children's-film remake of the
early tv story in which the Daleks made their debut is of interest mainly
to Dr Who completists wishing to see Cushing in the role, which he never
played on tv; though inferior to its original, it is at least superior to
the even more tepid film sequel, DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D. (1966).
[PN]

DOCTOR X
Film (1932). First National/Warner Bros. Dir Michael Curtiz (1888-1962),
starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster. Screenplay
Robert Tasker, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard W. Comstock and
Allen C. Miller. 77 mins. Original prints two-strip Technicolor, later
b/w.A series of cannibalistic murders committed when the Moon is full
prove, in this blend of sf, HORROR and the whodunnit, to have been
committed by a SCIENTIST maddened by the effect of his newly invented
synthetic flesh, from which he can grow a temporary artificial arm.
Curtiz's customary hard-edged direction enlivens this early, low-budget
potboiler. A more sophisticated version of the central idea is found in
DARKMAN (1990). [JB/PN]

DR. YEN SIN
US PULP MAGAZINE. 3 bimonthly issues, May/June-Sep/Oct 1936. Published by
Popular Publications; ed Rogers Terrill. DYS was a follow-up to an earlier
Popular title, The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG , itself intended to capitalize on
the popularity of Sax ROHMER's Fu Manchu; in fact the cover of #1 had
originally been painted for the previous title. All issues featured lead
novels by Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988), whose several books on flying
saucers later helped foment the UFO craze of the early 1950s. Yen Sin was
a conventional yellow-peril supervillain, intent on world conquest with
the aid of superscience. His opponent, Michael Traile, had been
accidentally deprived of the ability to sleep, so read a lot. The lead
novel of #1 was reprinted by Robert E. WEINBERG as Pulp Classics No. 9
(1976). [MJE/PN]

DODD, ANNA BOWMAN
(1855-1929) US writer whose anti-socialist sf novel, The Republic of the
Future, or Socialism a Reality (1887), set in AD2050, offers a scathing
and comical portrait of egalitarianism brought to the uttermost, resulting
in a technologically advanced antlike society. The tale actively
deprecates FEMINISM. [JC]

DODDERIDGE, ESME
(1916- ) US writer whose The New Gulliver, or The Adventures of Lemuel
Gulliver, Jr. in Capovolta (1979) brings its protagonist into a
matriarchal society, dystopian to its male visitor, in which by an ironic
role reversal all the men, who are subservient to women, carry out the
child-rearing and sexual-object functions which in the real USA at the
time the book was written were generally the roles of women. [JC/PN]

DOENIM, SUSAN
[s] George Alec EFFINGER.

DOLAN, BILL
Tom WILLARD.

DOLD, DOUGLAS (MERIWETHER)
(c1890-1932/6) US editor and writer, elder brother of Elliott DOLD, with
whom in 1915 he joined the Serbian army. As a result of injuries sustained
in combat, he gradually became blind, but this affliction did not prevent
him from editing The Danger Trail magazine, presiding over Clues,
Incorporated (which published Clues: A Magazine of Detective Stories), or
publishing several borderline sf/adventure tales. The last of these
appears to have been "Valley of Sin" in Miracle Science and Fantasy
Stories (which he also helped edit) in 1931. According to Murray LEINSTER,
DD died of pneumonia after his house caught fire and the firemen sprayed
him with water. [RB]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.

DOLD, (WILLIAM) ELLIOTT (Jr)
(1892-1957) US illustrator, son of noted psychiatrist William Elliott
Dold (1856-1942) and younger brother of Douglas DOLD. ED studied art at
the College of William and Mary in Virginia to 1912, and with his brother
joined the Serbian army in 1915. Although his 44 Art Deco drawings for
Harold HERSEY's Night (1923) are perhaps his finest work, ED is now best
remembered for his interior ILLUSTRATIONS for the early sf PULP MAGAZINES,
also in an Art Deco idiom. Using only black and white (with virtually no
greys), he was a master at depicting looming, massive, superbly detailed
and intricate MACHINES that dwarfed their human operators, whom he
depicted with relative indifference. ED contributed to ASTOUNDING
SCIENCE-FICTION 1934-8, and was one of that magazine's finest interior
illustrators; his illustrations for its serialization of E.E. "Doc"
SMITH's Skylark of Valeron (1934 ASF; 1949) are considered classics. He
edited, did colour covers and wrote a lead story for Hersey's short-lived
MIRACLE SCIENCE AND FANTASY STORIES (1931). His last sf appearances were
in 1941, when he painted covers for COSMIC STORIES and STIRRING SCIENCE
STORIES. [RB/JG]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION.

DOLEZAL, ERICH
[r] AUSTRIA.

DOLINSKY, MIKE
Working name used by US screenwriter Meyer Dolinsky (1923-1993?) for his
sf novel, Mind One (1972), in which two psychiatrists discover that a drug
meant to treat psychosis actually engenders TELEPATHY (see also ESP), and
find themselves relating warmly to each other (they are of opposite
sexes); as one of them is a Jesuit priest, an element of RELIGION soon
enriches the tale. As Meyer Dolinsky, MD wrote 3 episodes for the tv
series The OUTER LIMITS . [JC]

DOLPIN, REX
[r] Peter SAXON.

DOMECQ, H. BUSTOS
Adolfo BIOY CASARES; Jorge Luis BORGES.

DOMINIK, HANS
[r] GERMANY.

DONALDSON, STEPHEN R(EEDER)
(1947- ) US writer who remains best known for the two formidably
ambitious Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever high-fantasy
sequences. Although he was a FANTASY writer of central importance in the
1970s and 1980s, and winner of the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for most
promising writer in 1979, and although characters in Mordant's Need (see
listing below) shift worlds via gates which arguably work according to sf
conventions governing MATTER TRANSMISSION, SRD did not become of strong sf
interest until the publication of the first volumes of his ongoing Gap
sequence of Galaxy-spanning SPACE OPERAS: The Gap into Conflict: The Real
Story (1990 UK), The Gap into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge (1991), The Gap
into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises (1992) and The Gap into Madness:
Chaos and Order (1994), with at least one further volume, projected. The
volumes to date are characterized by a pounding bluntness of prose, a
plot-pattern which makes some superficial homage to traditional space
opera, and an underlying extremism in the creation of character (both the
villain and the seeming hero are almost supernaturally monstrous) and in
the expression of sexual violence. It is hard to predict what dark climax
is being mounted. [JC]Other works: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the
Unbeliever, comprising Lord Foul's Bane (1977), The Illearth War (1977)
and The Power that Preserves (1977); its sequel, the Second Chronicles of
Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, comprising The Wounded Land (1980), The
One Tree (1982) and White Gold Wielder (1983); a slim pendant to the
sequences, Gilden-Fire (1981 chap); Daughter of Regals and Other Tales
(coll 1984), not to be confused with Daughter of Regals (1984), which
prints only the title story of the previous volume; Epic Fantasy in the
Modern World: A Few Observations (1986 chap), nonfiction; the Mordant's
Need books, in effect one novel published in 2 vols as The Mirror of Her
Dreams (1986 UK) and A Man Rides Through (1987).As Reed Stephens: An
associational detective-novel sequence comprising The Man who Killed his
Brother (1980), The Man who Risked his Partner (1984) and The Man who
Tried to Get Away (1990).See also: DEL REY BOOKS; SWORD AND SORCERY.

DONNE, MAXIM
Madelaine DUKE.

DONNELLY, IGNATIUS
(1831-1901) US writer and politician, famous for his study Atlantis: The
Antediluvian World (1882), which was responsible for a considerable
resurgence of interest in the legend of ATLANTIS, and for The Great
Cryptogram (1888), in which he attempted to prove by cryptographic
analysis that Francis BACON wrote Shakespeare's early plays. His most
important sf novel was Caesar's Column (1890; early editions under the
pseudonym Edmund Boisgilbert), which countered the UTOPIAN optimism of
Edward BELLAMY with the argument that society was evolving towards greater
inequality and catastrophic WAR rather than towards peace and plenty. ID
wrote two other fantasies of social criticism: Doctor Huguet (1891), in
which the racist protagonist exchanges bodies with a Black man, and The
Golden Bottle (1892), in which a gold-making device is instrumental in the
overthrow of capitalism. [BS]See also: CITIES; LOST WORLDS; POLITICS;
SOCIAL DARWINISM.

DONOVAN, DICK
J.E. Preston MUDDOCK.

DONOVAN'S BRAIN
Film (1953). Dowling Productions/United Artists. Dir Felix Feist,
starring Lew Ayres, Gene Evans, Nancy Davis. Screenplay Feist, based on
Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt SIODMAK. 83 mins. B/w.One of three films
based on Siodmak's novel of the same name, the others being The LADY AND
THE MONSTER (1944) and VENGEANCE (vt The Brain) (1963). A scientist keeps
a dead businessman's brain artificially alive, but it has an evil,
telepathic influence over him. Feist, whose previous sf film was DELUGE
(1933), directs unspectacularly, but gets a good performance from Ayres,
who accomplishes the transitions from his natural to his possessed state
very well. The female lead later married Ronald Reagan. Despite its sf
elements, the film is more GOTHIC than scientific - the brain itself is
ludicrous. DB was parodied in The MAN WITH TWO BRAINS (1983). [JB]

DONSON, CYRIL
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.

DOOMWATCH
1. UK tv series (1970-72). BBC TV. Prod Terence Dudley. Series devised by
Kit PEDLER, Gerry DAVIS. Starring John Paul, Simon Oates, Robert Powell,
Wendy Hall, Joby Blanchard. Writers included Dudley, Pedler, Davis, Dennis
Spooner, Don Shaw, Martin Worth, Brian Hayles, John Gould. Dirs included
Dudley, Jonathan Alwyn, David Proudfoot, Lennie Mayne, Eric Hills, Darrol
Blake. 3 seasons, 57 50min episodes. Colour.In this drama series, the
first about dangers to Earth's ECOLOGY, a group of scientists -
aggressively ready to take on the Establishment and headed by caustic Dr
Quist (John Paul) - is set up as a watchdog over the rest of the
scientific community. Stronger safeguards in the use of everything from
chemical weapons and pesticides to new drugs and in vitro fertilization
are urged, while some lines of research should be abandoned altogether;
the not too deeply hidden subtext appeared to be that scientific research
is dangerous per se. Pedler and Davis departed before the 3rd season,
repudiating what they claimed was D's increasing lack of seriousness, but
in fact from the beginning the hoariest sf CLICHES had appeared beneath
the display of social conscience; apart from its overbearingly moralizing
tone there was little difference between D and the mad- SCIENTIST movies
of the 1930s and 1940s.2. Film (1972). Tigon. Dir Peter Sasdy, starring
Ian Bannen, Judy Geeson, John Paul, Simon Oates, George Sanders.
Screenplay Clive Exton, based on the BBC TV series. 92 mins. Colour.A
familiar horror-film plot is given a fashionable rationale, in what is
effectively a feature-film episode of the tv series. Visitors to a fishing
village on a remote offshore island are met with hostility; grossly
malformed people are being hidden away. The distortions - in fact,
acromegaly - have resulted not from the workings of Hell but from the
dumping of pituitary growth hormone (intended as an additive to animal
feed) in the sea nearby, although the horror stereotypes suggest the two
possible causes are topologically identical. Sasdy directed with style but
was handicapped by a banal script. [JB/PN]

DOONER, PIERTON W.
(1844-?1907) US writer whose Last Days of the Republic (1880) was the
first US Yellow Peril novel, and demonstrates the terribly common dynamic
by which a guilty party, or nation, feels compelled to transfer its guilt
to the victim or victim-nation: in 1880, the year of the book's
publication, the USA had been using Chinese coolies for some time as
forced labour, and in terms of this dynamic it was high time to accuse
them of being a menace. In the novel, the coolies nefariously gain civil
rights from cowardly Whites, and use their ill gotten power to gain
control of the Pacific coastal states, from which point the collapse of
Washington is only a matter of time. [JC]

DOPPELGANGER
(vt Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) Film (1969). Century 21
Productions/Universal. Prods Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON. Dir Robert
Parrish, starring Ian Hendry, Roy Thinnes, Patrick Wymark, Lyn Loring,
Herbert Lom. Screenplay by the Andersons, Donald James. 101 mins, cut to
94 mins (US). Colour.The first live-action feature from the Anderson
production team responsible for a number of tv series featuring puppets in
sf adventure scenarios, D, though panned by most critics, displays its
illogical plot with some style. Scientists discover a counter-Earth, an
exact duplicate of Earth that is always hidden on the opposite side of the
Sun - a centuries-old idea that popped up occasionally in pulp sf, as in
Split Image (1955) by Reed DE ROUEN. An expedition is mounted to reach the
counter-Earth, and the confusions of the subsequent story, involving
sabotage, characters meeting themselves and apparent conspiracy between
the two planets, are compounded by the fact that the story is told in
flashbacks by a scientist in a mental asylum, giving a Dr Caligari-like
ambiguity to the whole film. [JB/PN]

DORER, FRANCES (CATHERINE)
(? - ) US writer, always with Nancy Dorer, who began to publish work of
genre interest with When Next I Wake (dated 1978 but 1979) as by Frank
Dorn, and whose most ambitious effort was the Eagle sequence of sf
adventures, all dated 1979 but published 1980: By Daybreak the Eagle
(1980), Wings of the Eagle (1980) and Return of the Eagle (1980).
Singletons include Appointment with Yesterday (dated 1978 but 1979) as by
Dorn, Sunwatch (1979) as by Dorn, Where No Man has Trod (dated 1979 but
1980) and Two Came Calling (dated 1979 but 1980). [JC]

DORER, NANCY (JANE)
[r] Frances DORER.

DORMAN, SONYA (HESS)
(1924- ) US writer who began publishing sf in 1963 with "The Putnam
Tradition" for AMZ, and who established a reputation in the field for
intensely written, sometimes highly metaphorical stories. They are
surprisingly unlike her rather straightforward POETRY, for which she is
generally best known; the first of her verse collections was Poems (coll
1970). Planet Patrol (fixup 1978), a juvenile, is sf. [JC]

DORN, FRANK
Frances DORER.

DORRINGTON, ALBERT
(1871-? ) UK writer whose death-date is undetermined: he may have been
the AD who died in Australia in 1953. He was best known for The Radium
Terrors (1912), which combines Yellow Peril fears with the then widespread
fascination for the powers of radium. The plot unmemorably details a
conspiracy on the part of the former to use the latter. The Half-God
(1933) features super-radium. [JC]Other works: Our Lady of the Leopards
(1911), a fantasy.

DORSEY, CANDAS JANE
(1952- ) Canadian writer, arts journalist and social worker, author of
three early volumes of poetry and co-editor of Tesseracts(3) (anth 1991)
with Gerry Truscott (1955- ). CJD began publishing work of genre interest
with "Columbus Hits the Shoreline Rag" in Getting Here (anth 1977) ed Rudy
Weibe; her terse, complex stories, assembled in Machine Sex (coll 1988),
polemically re-use and rework sf and fantasy tropes from a FEMINIST
perspective, engaging most memorably, and fascinatedly, in the title
story, "(Learning About) Machine Sex", with the phallocentrisms of much
CYBERPUNK. The protagonist of the tale, a computer-design prodigy and
occasional hooker, debuted in CJD's first novel, the undistinguished
Hardwired Angel (1987), written with Nora Abercrombie (1960- ). [RK]See
also: CANADA.

DOS(-a-DOS)
When two books are bound together so that they share one spine, but with
their texts printed upside-down in respect to each other, the composite
volume is described in the publishing trade as being bound dos-a-dos
(literally "back-to-back"). Such a volume has two front covers and two
title pages, which the reader can confirm by turning any example
upside-down, revealing a second front cover, right way up, and a second
text, likewise. Almost always - though not invariably - the format has
been used in sf for paperback originals, the two best known mass-market
publishers to have done this being ACE BOOKS in their Ace Doubles series
and TOR BOOKS in their Tor Doubles series; some SMALL PRESSES have also
engaged in the practice. For the convenience of readers and collectors we
use the word "dos" in our book ascriptions in this encyclopedia to
designate any edition of a title making up one half of a dos-a-dos twin.A
problem arises. Towards the end of their existence as a line, Tor Doubles
began to appear with the 2 titles presented sequentially; in strict
bibliographical terms these late issues were, in fact, anthologies, just
as two earlier series - the Belmont Doubles and the Dell Binary Stars -
were, strictly speaking, anthologies. If - as was almost never the case -
any of the individual titles reprinted in these series had been originally
published as books, the resulting volume would have then been technically
describable as an omnibus. But readers do not tend to think of the volumes
in these series as being either anthologies or omnibuses; readers (and we)
tend to think of them as two titles bound together. We have therefore - in
deliberate violation of bibliographical protocol - extended the use of the
word "dos" in our book ascriptions to include all titles of publishers'
series which "feel" "dos"-like.In this encyclopedia we designate as "dos"
all genuine dos-a-dos bindings; we also designate as "dos" all other
series-linked bindings that contain two but no more than two titles, each
title being named on the cover. [JC/PN]

DOUBLEDAY
US general publisher which in the 1950s was one of the first US hardcover
houses to institute an sf line, an early title being Pebble in the Sky
(1950), which was Isaac ASIMOV'S first novel. (The Doubleday imprint,
Doubleday & Company, Inc., should not be confused with that of their
associated company, Nelson Doubleday, Inc., publishers of the US SCIENCE
FICTION BOOK CLUB.) Once the Doubleday line was established it published
about 30 titles a year, its authors in due course including many who at
the time were comparatively unknown, such as George Alec EFFINGER, Octavia
BUTLER, John CROWLEY, M. John HARRISON, Stephen KING, Josephine SAXTON and
Kate WILHELM. D also published many established authors, some of whom had
previously published mainly in paperback: they included Avram DAVIDSON,
Philip K. DICK, Harry HARRISON, Robert A. HEINLEIN, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Barry
MALZBERG, Bob SHAW and Roger ZELAZNY. D's anthology series have included
CHRYSALIS, UNIVERSE and Nebula Award Stories ( NEBULA). D was both loved
and loathed by sf authors: loved because it was a reliable market not
afraid to take risks with innovative material that was not obviously
commercial, loathed because its advances were small, its book production
often cheap, and its book promotion negligible. In 1981 D (whose sf editor
for the difficult years 1977-89 was Pat LoBrutto) halved the size of the
list. In 1986 it and associated companies, including Dell/Delacorte and
the Science Fiction Book Club (but not the New York Mets) were sold for
$475 million to the German company Bertelsmann, which already owned BANTAM
BOOKS and which thereby became one of the largest sf/fantasy publishers in
the USA, with around 170 titles a year.In 1987 the old Doubleday line was
revamped, the imprint now being called Doubleday Foundation after Isaac
Asimov's Foundation books (they had not initially been published by
Doubleday, but Asimov had treated the firm as his main publisher from
1950, and remained faithful to it until his death). The new list was very
much more consciously innovative than its predecessors, and ambitious
novels by authors like Dan SIMMONS and Sheri S. TEPPER soon began to
appear; books under this imprint often went on to be paperbacked by Bantam
Spectra. During 1991, however, Doubleday Foundation was merged into Bantam
Spectra, and the Doubleday name ceased to be relevant to sf publishing.
[PN]

DOUGHTY, CHARLES M(ONTAGU)
(1843-1926) UK explorer and writer whose Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)
profoundly influenced T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935), among others. The
difficult, archaic language of CMD's later work, a series of book-length
poems, has kept them from wide circulation. Two are of some sf interest:
The Cliffs (1909) features an airborne "Persanian" invasion of England,
which is successfully repelled; in The Clouds (1912) a similar invasion is
successful, and England occupied. Both poems are designed as warnings to
complacent Britons, and share many of the characteristics of the INVASION
stories popular before WWI. [JC]

DOUGHTY, FRANCIS W(ORCESTER)
(1850-1917) US numismatist, scholar and miscellaneous writer whose well
written, ingenious and original dime novels ( DIME-NOVEL SF) have often
been considered the finest examples of the category. His better stories
present a succession of highly imaginative strokes, often with good
historical backgrounds. "I" (1887) describes a double quest, for a
beautiful She Who Is Never Seen and for a remarkable manuscript hidden by
Saint Cyprian. The Cavern of Fire (1888) uses as its departure points (a)
the theory that the Mound Builders were ancient Greeks and (b) a HOLLOW
EARTH filled with teratological peoples. Two Boys' Trip to an Unknown
Planet (1889) is an astronomical fantasy, often on a mythic level, set on
a planet circling Sirius; it may have been a source of motifs for David
LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920). "Where?" (1889-90) takes place in a
strange Antarctica filled with grotesque peoples and superscientific
devices reminiscent of Bulwer LYTTON's vril. 3,000 Miles through the
Clouds (1892), which takes elements from Jules VERNE's The Mysterious
Island (trans 1875), puts three comrades into wildly imaginative
situations in an Arctic crater. Perhaps also by Doughty is Al and his
Air-Ship (1903) as by Gaston Garne, which describes scientifically
advanced giants in Antarctica, remarkable flying machines powered by a
vril-like source, and other marvels. An adult sf novel, Mirrikh (1892),
although highly imaginative, was not especially successful. [EFB]

DOUGLAS, CAROLE NELSON
(1944- ) US writer who began her career as a feature writer 1967-84 for
the St Paul Pioneer Press. Her first novels, like Amberleigh (1980), were
historical romances. She has become best known for energetic, layered
high-fantasy tales like Six of Swords (1982), the first volume in her
Kendric and Irissa sequence, which continues with Exiles of the Rynth
(1984), Keepers of Edanvant (1987), Heir of Rengarth (1988) and Seven of
Swords (1989). Though she has been an infrequent author of sf, the Probe
sequence - Probe (1985) and Counterprobe (1988) - is of some interest for
its slow unfolding of the mystery behind the amnesia afflicting a young
woman who has PSI POWERS and who turns out to be what the title says she
is: a probe inserted by ALIENS into the human world to gather data. But
love intervenes. It may be the case that CND will never wish to shake
herself completely free of romance idioms and plotlines; but, if she does
so, she might become one of the significant genre writers of the 1990s.
[JC]Other works:Fair Wind, Fiery Star (1981; much exp restored text 1994),
pirate tale set partly in the Bermuda Triangle; The Crystal books, Crystal
Days (1990) and Crystal Nights (coll 1990), associational, with some of
the same cast appearing in the Midnight Louie fantasy sequence comprising
Catnap: A Midnight Louie Mystery (1992) Pussyfoo (1993) and Cat on a Blue
Monday (1994); Good Night, Mr Holmes * (1990), Good Morning, Irene *
(1991) and Irene at Large (1993), associational pastiches of Sherlock
Holmes; the projected Taliswoman Trilogy, beginning with Cup of Clay
(1991) and Seed Upon the Wind (1992).See also: SUPERMAN.

DOUGLAS, GARRY
Garry KILWORTH.

DOUGLAS, IAIN
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.

DOUGLAS, JEFF
Andrew J. OFFUTT.

DOUGLAS, (GEORGE) NORMAN
(1868-1952) UK writer of superb meditative travel books and some fiction,
his best known novel being South Wind (1917). Unprofessional Tales (coll
1901), as by Normyx, consists mainly of fantasies; but in two novels of
his late maturity he dramatized his strongly misogynist and persuasively
"pagan" views in venues familiar to the reader of sf. They Went (1920; rev
1921) subversively promulgates a UTOPIAN aestheticism in a land much like
doomed Lyonesse. Through the tale of half-divine Linus and his imposition
of a rigid civilization upon the world, In the Beginning (1927 Italy), an
example of prehistoric sf, expresses - with a more vigorous loathing than
Thomas Burnett SWANN could muster 40 years later - the sense that
humanity's rise entailed the destruction of Eden, and of the sentient,
pagan, amoral creatures who dwelt there. [JC]Other works: Nerinda (1929
Italy).

DOUGLASS, ELLSWORTH
Probably the pseudonym of Elmer Dwiggins (? -? ), about whom little is
known. ED wrote "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (1899 Cassell's
Magazine), about a gyroscopically controlled space vessel, with Edwin
PALLANDER. His sf novel, Pharoah's Broker: Being the Very Remarkable
Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner (Written by Himself) (1899
UK), is an interplanetary romance set on MARS, where parallel EVOLUTION
has resulted in a society almost identical to that of Egypt in the time of
Joseph. In the end the hero, having been a grain-broker in Chicago, is
able to take on Joseph's role. [PN/JC]

DOWDING, HENRY WALLACE
(?1888-?1967) US writer who was most active in the 1920s. His sf novel,
The Man from Mars, or Service, for Service's Sake (1910), is occupied for
much of its length with its protagonist's search for a MCGUFFIN document,
but shifts in its later moments to be a long description, on the part of
the protagonist's employer, of his time on MARS, which planet is small,
quite close to Earth, and UTOPIAN. [JC]

DOWLING, TERRY
(1947- ) Australian lecturer in English, tv performer, songwriter and
writer. One of the most interesting new voices in local sf, TD is
beginning to glean international praise as well. His master's thesis was,
unusually for AUSTRALIA, about sf - its topic was J.G. BALLARD and the
Surrealists. "The Man who Walks Away behind the Eyes" (1982 OMEGA SCIENCE
DIGEST) inaugurated an sf career that has so far been devoted exclusively
to short fiction (over 30 stories to date); his work was at first too
obviously indebted to Cordwainer SMITH and Jack VANCE, but later developed
an individual voice. TD's idiosyncratic but vivid between-the-lines style
is perhaps best displayed in his Tyson stories, some of which are
collected in Rynosseros (coll of linked stories 1990), Wormwood (coll of
linked stories 1991), Blue Tyson (coll 1992)and Twilight Beach (coll of
linked stories 1993): though many characters are featured, they tell
centrally : of Tom Tyson, captain of the sandship Rynosseros, in which he
roams the strange, high-tech Ab'o societies of a future Australia's
outback, occasionally undergoing mystical epiphanies. With Richard DELAP
and Gil Lamont (1947- ) he edited The Essential Ellison (coll 1987) by
Harlan ELLISONand with Van Ikin he put together in Mortal Fire: Best
Australian SF (anth 1993), which presents the sf of his native land as
evolving its own characteristic themes and timbre. [PN]

DOWNING, PAULA E.
Working name of US attorney, municipal judge and writer Paula Elaine
Downing King (1951- ), who writes also as Paula King; she is married to T.
Jackson KING. PED began publishing work of genre interest with "Loni's
Promise" for Discoveries in 1989. Her first novel, Mad Roy's Light (1990)
as Paula King, is an sf adventure featuring a human woman who must come to
terms with her life within an interstellar trade guild while at the same
time striving to comprehend the ALIEN Li Fawn, who mercilessly use
biological engineering ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) to modify other species for
their own purposes. Her second, Rinn's Star (1990), plays something of a
game of words with its title, as the telepathic protagonist Rinn, who
lives on an interesting planet and travels between the stars, also sees
her own personal star wax and wane erratically as she shoots from one
culture to another, each having a different attitude towards her
background and her gift. In Flare Star (1992) a colony planet is
devastated when its sun flares; Fallway (1993) treated similar material;
and A Whisper of Time (1994) set up a complex First Contact plot (
COMMUNICATIONS) involving an alien orphan who, brought up on Earth, has
fantasies about Mayan ruins, which resemble her own deepest memories of
some other place. [JC]

DOWNMAN, FRANCIS
Ernest OLDMEADOW.

DOYLE, [Sir] ARTHUR CONAN
(1859-1930) UK writer known primarily for his work outside the sf field
and in particular for his Sherlock Holmes stories. Born in Edinburgh and
educated by Jesuits, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University and
initiated his own practice in Portsmouth in 1882, supplementing his income
by writing. The first Holmes novel was A Study in Scarlet (1887). His
historical novels, Micah Clarke (1889) and The White Company (1891), were
relatively unsuccessful, but the first series of Holmes short stories in
The STRAND MAGAZINE (1891-2) secured his popularity. His interest in
subjects on the borderline between science and mysticism is evident in a
potboiler about supernatural vengeance from the mysterious East, The
Mystery of Cloomber (1889), and in a short novel of telepathic vampirism,
The Parasite (1895). Although the Holmes stories suggest an incisively
analytical and determinedly rationalistic mind, ACD was fascinated by all
manner of occult disciplines, including hypnotism, Theosophy and oriental
mysticism; following the death of his son he became an ardent convert to
Spiritualism.ACD's first SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, The Doings of Raffles Haw
(1891), is a hurriedly written account of a gold-maker who becomes
disenchanted with the fruits of his philanthropy. His early sf short
stories include "The Los Amigos Fiasco" (1892), in which an experimental
electric chair "supercharges" a criminal instead of killing him, and the
personality-exchange story "The Great Keinplatz Experiment" (1894). ACD
abandoned sf during the early decades of his literary success but returned
before WWI to make his most important contribution to the genre: following
"The Terror of Blue John Gap" (1910) - about a monstrous visitor from an
underground world - and a satirical account of "The Great Brown-Pericord
Motor" (1911) came The Lost World (1912), a classic LOST-WORLD novel in
which the redoubtable Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a
plateau in South America where dinosaurs still survive. In a sequel, The
Poison Belt (1913), the Earth faces disaster as a result of atmospheric
poisoning. "The Horror of the Heights" (1913) is an account of strange
forms of life inhabiting the upper atmosphere. The novelette "Danger!"
(1914; reprinted in Danger!, and Other Stories, coll 1918) is Doyle's
contribution to the imminent- WAR genre, anticipating submarine attacks on
shipping - a prophecy received sceptically by the Admiralty but validated
within months.ACD's post-WWI passion for the paranormal, which led him to
such excesses as the endorsement of Elsie Wright's and Frances Griffiths's
clumsily faked photographs of the "Cottingley fairies" in The Coming of
the Fairies (1922), strongly infects his later sf. In The Land of Mist
(1926) Challenger is converted to spiritualism; the remaining stories in
the series-which can be found alongside the titular occult romance in The
Maracot Deep and Other Stories (coll 1929) as well as in The Professor
Challenger Stories (omni 1952; vt The Complete Professor Challenger) - are
weak, though "When the World Screamed" (1929) is a striking early
LIVING-WORLD tale.ACD's earlier short stories, including numerous
fantasies and a few trivial sf stories not mentioned above, exist in many
collections, including The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales (coll
1890), The Great Keinplatz Experiment, and Other Stories (coll 1894 US;
rev vt The Great Keinplatz Experiment, and Other Tales of Twilight and the
Unseen 1919 US), and Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of
Medical Life (coll 1894), most of whose contents are reprinted in The
Conan Doyle Stories (coll 1929). The Best Science Fiction of Arthur Conan
Doyle (coll 1981), ed Charles G. WAUGH and Martin H. GREENBERG, collects
almost all of his shorter sf; one notable exception is an interesting
essay in alternative history ( ALTERNATE WORLDS), "The Death Voyage" (The
Strand 1929).Since Sherlock Holmes fell into the public domain the
character has been popular in sf stories, appearing in key roles in, among
others, Morlock Night * (1979) by K.W. JETER, Sherlock Holmes' War of the
Worlds * (1975) by Manly Wade and Wade WELLMAN, Exit Sherlock Holmes *
(1977) by Robert Lee HALL, Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes * (1979) by Loren D.
Estleman and Time for Sherlock Holmes * (1983) by David DVORKIN. Druid's
Blood (1988) by Esther M. Friesner features Holmes (here called Brihtric
Donne) in an alternate world where MAGIC works; ACD himself appears as
Arthur Elric Boyle. The first novel of this "revival", The Seven-Per-Cent
Solution (1974) by Nicholas Meyer is of sf interest in that it involves
early psychoanalysis ( PSYCHOLOGY) and the father of psychoanalysis
himself, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). A relevant anthology is Sherlock
Holmes through Time and Space (anth 1984) ed Isaac ASIMOV, Martin H.
GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH. [BS]Other works: The Best Supernatural
Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle (coll 1979 US) ed E.F. BLEILER; The
Supernatural Tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (anth 1987) ed Peter Haining.
See also: ATLANTIS; BIOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DIME-NOVEL SF;
DISASTER; ESCHATOLOGY; HISTORY OF SF; HORROR IN SF; MACHINES; MEDICINE;
MONEY; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; POWER SOURCES; PSI POWERS; RADIO;
SCIENTISTS; SERIES; UNDER THE SEA.

DOYLE, DEBRA
(1952- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "Bad
Blood" in Werewolves (anth 1988) ed Jane YOLEN and Martin H. GREENBERG,
which was expanded into a novel (see Bad Blood below); all her books have
been written with James D(ouglas) MacDonald (1954- ), and we follow the
alphabet-and make no estimate of seniority in this partnership-in treating
all their joint work under DD. Most of this work has been fantasy (see
Other Works below), and some has been TIES such as their 2 titles in the
Planet Builders sequence, Night of Ghosts and Lightning * (1989) and
Zero-Sum Games * (1989), both as by Robyn Tallis; Horror High: Pep Rally *
(1991) as by Nicholas Adams; and their 2 titles in the 4th Tom Swift
sequence (see TOM SWIFT): Monster Machine * (1991) and Aquatech Warriors *
(1991), both as by Victor APPLETON. Robert Silverberg's Time Tours #3:
Timecrime, Inc * (1991) and Daniel M. Pinkwater's Melvinge of the
Megaverse #2: Night of the Living Rat * (1992) are also ties.Their first
novel in their own right, Knight's Wyrd (1992), is fantasy; but the
Mageworlds series-comprising The Price of the Stars (1992), Starpilot's
Grave (1993) and By Honor Betray'd (1994)-moves into space opera with some
flair, though not without recourse to fantasy outcomes when the going gets
tough for the exile princess who becomes a space pilot and stirs up
trouble, hither and yon, around the galaxy. Bad Blood (1993)-which
incorporates DD's solo first story-and Hunter's Moon (1994) make up a
children's series about werewolves and vampires. [JC]Other Works: the
Circle of Magic sequence, comprising School of Wizardry (1990), Tournament
and Tower (1990), City by the Sea (1990), The Prince's Players (1990), The
Prisoners of Bell Castle (1990) and The High King's Daughter (1990).

DOZOIS, GARDNER (RAYMOND)
(1947- ) US writer, anthologist and, from 1985 (with the Jan 1986 issue),
editor of ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, winning 5 HUGOS between
1988 and 1992; he is married to Susan CASPER. He began publishing sf in
1966 with "The Empty Man" for If, but it was not until after military
service (in which he worked as a military journalist) that he began
producing such stories as "A Special Kind of Morning" (1971) and "Chains
of the Sea" (1972), which made him a figure of some note in the latter-day
US NEW WAVE, causing some misapplied criticism of his "pessimism" and
general lack of interest in storytelling; both stories are included in The
Visible Man (coll 1977), which assembles his best early work, and reappear
inGeodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois (coll
1992).His first novel, Nightmare Blue (1975) with George Alec EFFINGER, a
fast-paced adventure, demonstrates a dangerous facility on both authors'
parts. Much more important - and less "professional" - is his first solo
novel, STRANGERS (1974 New Dimensions; exp 1978), an intense and well told
love story between a human male and an ALIEN female, set on her home
planet, in a Galaxy humans signally do not dominate; her death from
bearing his child is biologically inevitable (the plot's derivation from
Philip Jose FARMER's THE LOVERS [1961] can be seen as homage) and stems
from a mutual incomprehension rooted in culture and the intrinsic solitude
of beings (see also SEX). Never a prolific author, though fluently capable
as an editor, GD has collaborated frequently with associates in the
writing of stories, many of which are assembled in Slow Dancing through
Time (coll 1990) with Susan CASPER, Jack DANN, Jack C. HALDEMAN II and
Michael SWANWICK. The Peacemaker (1983 IASFM; 1991 chap) won a NEBULA for
1983 and "Morning Child" a Nebula for 1984.GD has written considerable sf
criticism, and in The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr (1977 chap) he
constructed an analysis which was not to be disqualified by Alice
Sheldon's revelation that she was TIPTREE. An anthology, Writing Science
Fiction and Fantasy: Twenty Dynamic Essays by Today's Top Professionals
(anth 1991) co-edited with Tina Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Ian Randal Strock
and Sheila Williams, extols dynamic professionalism. His first fiction
anthologies, intelligently edited and of continuing interest, are A Day in
the Life (anth 1972), Future Power (anth 1976) with Dann, and Another
World (anth 1977). Subsequent anthologies, all ed with Dann (except as
noted), are Aliens! (anth 1980), Unicorns! (anth 1982), Magicats! (anth
1984), Bestiary! (anth 1985), Mermaids! (anth 1985), Sorcerers! (anth
1986), Demons! (anth 1987), Dogtales! (anth 1988), Ripper! (anth 1988; vt
Jack the Ripper 1988 UK) with Casper, Seaserpents! (anth 1989), Dinosaurs!
(anth 1990), Magicats II (anth 1991), Little People! (anth 1991) and
Horses! (anth 1994). Later singleton anthologies were The Best of Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (anth 1988), Time Travelers (anth 1989),
Transcendental Tales from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (anth
1989), Isaac Asimov's Aliens (anth 1991), Isaac Asimov's Robots (anth
1991) with Sheila Williams, and The Legend Book of Science Fiction (anth
1991 UK; vt Modern Classics of Science Fiction 1992 US), Isaac Asimov's SF
Lite (anth 1993), Isaac Asimov's War (anth 1993), Modern Classic Short
Novels of Science Fiction (anth 1994) and Isaac Asimov's Cyberdreams (anth
1994).In 1977 GD took over an ongoing year's-best anthology from Lester
DEL REY and edited several Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year
ANTHOLOGIES: Sixth Annual Collection (anth 1977), Seventh Annual
Collection (anth 1978), Eighth Annual Collection (anth (1979), Ninth
Annual Collection (anth 1980) and Tenth Annual Collection (anth 1981).
After the termination of this series, he launched a further ongoing
sequence, The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection (anth
1984), Second Annual Collection (anth 1985), Third Annual Collection (anth
1986), Fourth Annual Collection (anth 1987; vt The Mammoth Book of Best
New Science Fiction 1987 UK), Fifth Annual Collection (anth 1988; vt Best
New SF 2 1988 UK), Sixth Annual Collection (anth 1989; vt Best New SF 3
1989 UK) Seventh Annual Collection (anth 1990; vt Best New SF 4 1990 UK),
Eighth Annual Collection (anth 1991; vt Best New SF 5 1991 UK), Ninth
Annual Collection (anth 1992), Tenth Annual Collection (anth 1993; vt Best
New SF 7 1993 UK) and Eleventh Annual Collection (anth 1994). [JC]See
also: CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF;
CYBERPUNK; HISTORY OF SF; INVISIBILITY; OMNI; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS;
POLLUTION; SHARECROP.

DR
In this encyclopedia's alphabetical listing, "Dr" is, as is conventional,
treated as if spelled out in full-i.e., as "Doctor".

DRAGON
GAMES AND TOYS.

DRAGON PUBLICATIONS
VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE.

DRAGONS
SUPERNATURAL CREATURES.

DRAKE, DAVID A(LLEN)
(1945- ) US lawyer and writer who served as the Assistant Town Attorney
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1972-80. He became a full-time writer in
1981, although his first story, the H.P. LOVECR AFT pastiche "Denkirch",
had appeared much earlier, in Travellers by Night (anth 1967) ed August W.
DERLETH. Though the wide success of his various military-sf novels and
series and SHARED-WORLD enterprises has perhaps had a simplifying effect
on his reputation, DAD has, in fact, from the beginning of his career
written a wide variety of work, both stories and novels, a range perhaps
best encapsulated in his first collection of unconnected stories, From the
Heart of Darkness (coll 1983), which assembles sf, fantasy and horror
tales written from 1974 onwards and set in the past, present and future.
From early in his career, his prose has been spare and telling though
occasionally, in some of the more routine sf adventures, seemingly no more
than cost-efficient.DAD first came to wide notice with his Hammer's
Slammers sequence of military-sf tales set in a SPACE-OPERA Galaxy:
Hammer's Slammers (coll 1979; exp 1987), #2: Cross the Stars (1984), #3:
At Any Price (1985), #4: Counting the Cost (1987), #5: Rolling Hot (1989),
#6: The Warrior (1991), #7: The Sharp End (1993), and The Voyage (1994),
set in the Hammer universe and retellilng the tale of Jason and the
Argonauts. It is very noticeable that the mercenaries involved in this
sequence, and in most of DAD's other military sf, are (as it were)
soldiers on the ground, and that representatives of the officer class
generally merit the suspicion with which they are greeted. Though its
general political vision could not be described as anarchist, DAD's work
lacks-possibly as a consequence of his indifference to the loquacious cod
stoicism ascribed by other writers to officer classes in general - a sense
of philosophizing import, gaining much thereby, so that he can concentrate
on the moment-to-moment exigencies of honorable mercenary soldiering. The
Fleet sequence of SHARED-WORLD anthologies, created and ed by DAD and Bill
FAWCETT - The Fleet * (anth 1988), #2: Counter Attack * (anth 1988), #3:
Breakthrough * (anth 1989), #4: Sworn Allies * (anth 1990), #5: Total War
* (anth 1990) and #6: Crisis * (anth 1991) - does not depart markedly from
this mature restraint, which is further manifested in a sequel series, the
Battlestation sequence comprising Battlestation * (anth 1992) and Vanguard
* (anth 1993). The Crisis of Empire sequence, essentially written as TIES
by his collaborators - Crisis of Empire #1: An Honorable Defense * (1988)
with Thomas T. THOMAS, #2: Cluster Command * (1989) with William C. DIETZ
and #3: The War Machine * (1989) with Roger MacBride ALLEN - rather more
flamboyantly follows the plummeting career of a captain who reaches bottom
in the third volume but whom we expect, in projected continuations, to
save the Empire. The Northworld sequence - Northworld (1990), #2:
Vengeance (1991) and #3: Justice (1992) - sets its military operations on
a world which operates as a gateway to several ALTERNATE-WORLD settings.
The General sequence with S.M. STIRLING - expected to run several volumes
beyond The Forge (1991), The Hammer1992 - features yet another military
officer, befriended on his far-off planetary home by a battle COMPUTER
planning to re-establish a Galactic Federation.With The Dragon Lord
(1979), an exercise in Arthurian SWORD AND SORCERY, DAD began to publish
singletons set in various venues and times, and of varying quality. Time
Safari (coll of linked stories 1982); exp vt Tyrannosaur 1994 makes one of
the hoary CLICHES of TIME-TRAVEL tales -the dinosaur hunt - vividly
present to the mind's eye through the well researched verisimilitude of
the telling. Birds of Prey (1984) brings Ancient Rome, again through time
travel, vividly to life, as does Killer (1974 Midnight Sun #1; 1985) with
Karl Edward Wagner (1945- ). Bridgehead (1986) combines time travel with
interstellar military action and intrigue. Dagger * (1988) is a tied
contribution to the Thieves' World enterprise, and Explorers in Hell *
(1989) with Janet E. MORRIS is part of the Heroes in Hell enterprise. Old
Nathan (coll of linked stories 1991), set in a traditional USA,
nostalgically tells tales of a crabby but lovable ghost-hunter. Today
there seems very little to stop DAD from writing exactly what he wishes to
write. [JC]Other works: Skyripper (1983); The Forlorn Hope (1984); Active
Measures (1985), Kill Ratio (1987) and Target (1989), all three with Janet
E. Morris; Fortress (1986); Lacey and his Friends (coll of linked stories
1986); the World of Crystal Walls fantasy sequence, beginning with The Sea
Hag (1988), further volumes projected; Ranks of Bronze (1986); Vettius and
his Friends (coll of linked stories 1989); Surface Action (1990); The
Hunter Returns (1991), adapted from Fire-Hunter (1951) by Jim Kjelgaard
(1910-1959); The Military Dimension (coll 1991); The Jungle * (1991),
based on (and printed with) "Clash by Night" (1943) as by Lawrence
O'Donnell, a joint pseudonym of Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE, and here
ascribed, some think erroneously, to Kuttner alone; Starliner (1992); Car
Warriors TM: The Square Deal * (1992); High Strangeness (1992); Igniting
the Reaches (1994).As Editor: The Starhunters sequence of reprint stories,
comprising Men Hunting Things (anth 1988), Things Hunting Men (anth 1988)
and Bluebloods (anth 1990); the Space sequence, all with Martin H.
GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH, comprising Space Gladiators (anth 1989),
Space Infantry (anth 1989) and Space Dreadnoughts (anth 1990); A Separate
Star (anth 1989) and Heads to the Storm (anth 1989), both with Sandra
MIESEL and both constituting a tribute to Rudyard KIPLING; The Eternal
City (anth 1990) with Greenberg and Waugh.See also: ALIENS; GAMES AND
SPORTS; VENUS; WAR; WEAPONS.

DRAYTON, HENRY S(HIPMAN)
(1840-1923) US writer whose lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) novel, In Oudemon:
Reminiscences of an Unknown People (1900), features a 100-year-old English
colony in South America which is technologically advanced, telepathic,
socialist and Christian. [JC]

DREAMSCAPE
Film (1984). Bella Productions/Zupnik-Curtis Enterprises. Dir Joseph
Ruben, starring Dennis Quaid, Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Eddie
Albert, Kate Capshaw, David Patrick Kelly. Screenplay David Loughery,
Chuck Russell, Ruben, based on a story by Loughery. 99 mins. Colour.A
gambler with psychic powers (Quaid) is persuaded to take part in
experiments in "dreamlinking" at a research centre. He learns how to enter
other people's dreams and interact with them. There is a plot to murder
the President, who has been having dreams of nuclear holocaust, by using
an evil psychic to assassinate him during a nightmare, but the Quaid
character intervenes in the dream. The theme can be traced back at least
to "Dreams are Sacred" (1948 ASF) by Peter Phillips, and a similar notion
would later be the focus of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. In D the
penny-dreadful thriller plot is so ludicrous that it is only the dreams
themselves that have much entertainment value. The effects are lively,
especially in the climactic vision of Washington in flames after the Bomb.
[PN]See also: VIRTUAL REALITY.

DREAM WORLD
US DIGEST-size magazine. 3 quarterly issues, Feb-Aug 1957; published by
ZIFF-DAVIS; ed Paul W. FAIRMAN. Subtitled "Stories of Incredible Powers",
DW was initiated as a response to the success of similar issues of
FANTASTIC, with stories of wish-fulfilment sometimes featuring PSI POWERS.
#1 reprinted stories by Thorne Smith and P.G. WODEHOUSE, but the magazine
included little fiction of note, although Harlan ELLISON and Robert
SILVERBERG contributed amusing stories. [FHP/MJE]

DREW, WAYLAND
(1932- ) Canadian teacher and writer who began publishing sf with The
Wabeno Feast (1973), a complex tale about HOLOCAUST and its roots, in
which three narrative strands all tangibly cohere-the 18th-century journal
of an early entrepreneur who confronts the heart of darkness in the pale
wabeno (an Indian shaman), the canoe trip of a Canadian couple through the
wilderness upon which the earlier visitor has already stamped the seal of
the civilized world, and a NEAR-FUTURE flight into the same but now
savaged wilderness on the part of escapees from a DISASTER directly tied
to the spoliation of the planet. After Dragonslayer * (1981 US), a film
tie, WD composed in The Erthring Cycle another post-holocaust narrative -
The Memoirs of Alcheringia (1984 US), The Gaian Experiment (1985 US) and
The Master of Norriya (1986 US) - which describes the founding of a secret
underground society, the Yggdrasil Project, via which it is hoped to
surmount inevitable planetary catastrophe. But, as the final volume moves
to a quiet, sombre close, the reader will perhaps be reminded of the dying
fall which concludes George R. STEWART's EARTH ABIDES (1949). [JC]Other
works: * batteries not included * (1987 US), novelizing * BATTERIES NOT
INCLUDED (1987); Willow * (1988 US), another film tie; Halfway Man *
(1989).

DREXEL, JAY B.
[s] Jerome BIXBY.

DRUERY, CHARLES THOMAS
(1843-1917) UK writer, often on UK flora, whose didactic novel, The New
Gulliver, or Travels in Athomia (1897), presents its shrunken narrator
with strange new perspectives on the natural world. [JC]

DRUGS
The use of drugs, both real and imaginary, is a common theme in sf,
notably in CYBERPUNK. The topic is discussed in detail under PERCEPTION,
and a little under NEW WAVE and PSYCHOLOGY. Film and tv treatments of the
theme include ALTERED STATES, DOOMWATCH, LIQUID SKY and THX 1138. A small
selection of the many sf authors who have used drug themes is: Brian W.
ALDISS, Ralph BLUM, Karin BOYE, William S. BURROUGHS, Don DELILLO, Philip
K. DICK, Charles DUFF, Mick FARREN, William GIBSON, Evan HUNTER, Aldous
HUXLEY, K.W. JETER, Richard KADREY, Irwin LEWIS, Talbot MUNDY, Geoff
RYMAN, Lucius SHEPARD, Norman SPINRAD, Bruce STERLING, Robert Louis
STEVENSON and Ian WATSON. [PN]

DRUILLET, PHILIPPE
(1944- ) Innovative French artist with an epic imagination and an
astringent pen-line style who cofounded with Moebius (Jean GIRAUD) and
others the publishing company Les Humanoides Associes and the imaginative
graphic-fiction magazine METAL HURLANT in 1975; much of the content of the
latter has been published in English in the US magazine HEAVY METAL.
Brought up in Spain, PD was a photographer until the publication of his
first strip Lone Sloane (graph coll 1967; intro by Maxim JAKUBOWSKI), a
bawdy SPACE OPERA influenced by US CINEMA and HEROIC FANTASY. A unique
illustrator, often clumsy in his portrayal of the human face, PD has
enlarged the graphic structures of the sf COMIC strip and created a wild,
flamboyant, morally ambiguous universe of crazed architectures and
monstrous ALIENS. The increasingly obsessive Lone Sloane adventures were
continued in Les 6 voyages de Lone Sloane ["The Six Journeys of Lone
Sloane"] (graph coll 1972) and, with script by Jacques Lob, Delirius
(graph coll 1973) - together collected in English as Lone Sloane -
Delirius (graph omni trans 1975 UK) - followed by Yragael (graph coll 1974
with script by Michel Demuth) and Urm le fou (graph coll 1975) - together
collected in English as Yragael - Urm (graph omni trans Pauline Tennant
1976 UK). PD tackled SWORD AND SORCERY in his adaptation of Michael
MOORCOCK's Elric of Melnibone with script by Jakubowski and Demuth as
Elrick (graph 1973; with script by Moorcock as Elric 1973 UK). La nuit
["The Night"] (graph 1977), a sombre panorama of urban warfare, was
completed after the traumatic experience of his wife's dying from cancer
in 1975. His other works include Vuzz (graph 1974), Retour a Bakaam
["Return to Bakaam"] (graph 1975) with script by Francois Truchaud,
Mirages (graph 1976), Salammbo (graph 1983) and Nosferatu (graph coll
1982; trans 1991 US), the last being a collection of black-and-white
strips first published in the magazine Pilote. During the mid-1980s PD was
commissioned to create the internal decor for the Paris Metro station at
Porte de la Villette; he has also produced sculpture and created a
children's sf animated tv series, Bleu (52 26min episodes, 1989-current).
[MJ/RT]See also: FANTASY; ILLUSTRATION.

DRUMM, CHRIS
(1949- ) US bookseller, publisher and bibliographer who has published
under the imprint Chris Drumm Booklets a large number of chapbooks
containing stories and other work by R.A. L AFFERTY and others. Beginning
in 1983, his BIBLIOGRAPHIES, all arranged with an economic practicality
sometimes missing from this field, include works on Algis BUDRYS, Hal
CLEMENT, Thomas M. DISCH, James E. GUNN, Lafferty, Larry NIVEN, Mack
REYNOLDS, John T. SLADEK and Richard WILSON; in this encyclopedia they are
listed under the authors treated (whom see). [JC]

DRUMM, D.B.
House pseudonym used on Dell Books' post- HOLOCAUST Traveler series of
SURVIVALIST FICTION, initiated by Ed Naha, with most of the novels thought
to be the work of John SHIRLEY. ( Ed NAHA for details.) [PN]

DRURY, ALLEN (STUART)
(1918- ) US writer of a sequence of novels depicting US political (
POLITICS) life from a point roughly similar to real-life 1960 and growing
into a full-fledged history of the NEAR FUTURE. The bent is conservatively
anti-communist, and the satirical effects are often telling, though
sometimes tendentious. The series comprises Advise and Consent (1959),
which won a Pulitzer, A Shade of Difference (1962), Capable of Honor
(1966), Preserve and Protect (1968), Come Nineveh, Come Tyre: The
Presidency of Edward M. Jason (1973), in which world communism topples an
unready USA into chaos, and The Promise of Joy (The Presidency of Orrin
Knox) (1975), in which a war between the USSR and China further challenges
the pacifist- and liberal-ridden republic. The Throne of Saturn (1971), in
which the Russians attempt to sabotage the USA's first manned expedition
to MARS, is similar in tone but otherwise unconnected to the series. Two
later books, The Hill of Summer: A Novel of the Soviet Conquest (1981) and
its sequel, The Roads of Earth (1984), break no new ground. [JC]

DRYASDUST
M.Y. HALIDOM.

DUANE, DIANE E(LIZABETH)
(1952- ) US writer, most respected for her work in fantasy. She is
married to fantasy author Peter Morwood (1956- ), with whom she has
collaborated on three books. She began writing fantasies with the Epic
Tale of the Five sequence - The Door into Fire (1979) and The Door into
Shadow (1984), later extended with The Door into Sunset (1992) - and
continued with the Wizard sequence: So You Want to Be a Wizard? (1983),
Deep Wizardry (1985) and High Wizardry (1990), all three being assembled
as Support Your Local Wizard (omni 1990), plus A Wizard Abroad (1993). Of
more direct sf interest are several successful STAR TREK ties: The Wounded
Sky * (1983), My Enemy, My Ally * (1984), The Romulan Way * (1987) with
Morwood, Spock's World * (1988), Doctor's Orders * (1990)and Star Trek,
the Next Generation: Dark Mirror * (1993). Though the smooth power of her
best fantasies does not transmit perfectly to her sf ties, the Star Trek
examples are by no means negligible. Other ties include Guardians of the
Three #2: Keeper of the City * (anth 1989) and Space Cops: Mindblast *
(1991), both with Morwood, and Space Cops: Kill Station * (1992), seaQuest
DSV: The Novel * (1993) with Morwood, based on the pilot for the seaQuest
tv series, and Spider-Man: The Venom Factor * (1994). [JC]

Du BOIS, THEODORA (McCORMICK)
(1890-1986) US writer best known for her many detective novels, though
The Devil's Spoon (1930), featuring visitors from other worlds, and Sarah
Hall's Sea God (1952) are fantasies. In her sf novel, Solution T-25
(1951), the USSR wages successful nuclear war against the USA. An
underground resistance, faking collaboration with the occupation forces,
develops Solution T-25, which dissolves the Soviet leadership's
authoritarian personality structures, turning them into benign humorists
incapable of commanding their forces. [JC]Other works: Armed with a New
Terror (1936) and Murder Strikes an Atomic Unit (1946), both
associational.

Du BOIS, WILLIAM PENE
(1916-1993) US writer, illustrator and art editor and designer for Paris
Review. His own novels, which he illustrates himself (he also illustrates
other writers' books), are usually juveniles, though the illustrations are
of general interest. He began publishing with stories like Elizabeth, the
Cow Ghost (1936), Giant Otto (1936), and The Flying Locomotive (1941), and
much of his work employs fantasy elements. The ANTIGRAVITY device featured
in Peter Graves (1950) verges on sf, and The Twenty-One Balloons (1947) is
a full-fledged sf novel: a retired professor, travelling across the
Pacific by BALLOON in 1883, is forced down on Krakatoa, where he finds a
UTOPIA in full swing, financed by its inhabitants' secret trips to
civilization to sell diamonds, which they have in plenty. The famous
eruption of that year finishes the experiment, but everyone escapes by
balloon. [JC]See also: CHILDREN'S SF.

DUDGEON, ROBERT ELLIS
(1820-1904) UK homeopathic doctor, author of the UTOPIAN novel Colymbia
(1873, published anon). Written in a spirit of competition with Erewhon
(1872; rev 1903) by Samuel BUTLER, who was RED's patient, it is set on an
equatorial archipelago in the Pacific and tells of a lost race ( LOST
WORLDS) of Englishmen interbred with Oceanic natives; their submarine city
is powered by tidal energy. Their remarkably free sexual practices allow
RED to satirize those of Victorian England. Colymbia is livelier and more
original than most of its kind. [PN]See also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS.

DUDINTSEV, VLADIMIR
(1918- ) Russian writer whose novel Not by Bread Alone (1956 Novy Mir;
trans 1957 US) seemed at first to proclaim the Soviet thaw, but he was
publicly reprimanded for it soon after its publication. Novogodniaia
skazka (1956 Novy Mir; trans Gabriella Azrael as A New Year's Tale 1960
chap US; vt A New Year's Fable 1960 chap US; first book publication in
USSR 1965) is a kind of sf morality tale in which the protagonist, by
composing himself for his expected death, discovers a new source of cheap
light and heat. [JC]

DUDLEY-SMITH, TREVOR
[r] Elleston TREVOR.

DUFF
AWARDS.

DUFF, CHARLES (St LAWRENCE)
(1894-1966) Irish translator and writer whose sf play, Mind Products
Limited: A Melodrama of the Future in Three Acts and an Epilogue (1932
Netherlands), though breezily deprecatory of the 1960 world it depicts,
introduces an inventive range of extrapolatory material, including mind
control (and X-ray vision) through drugs, carplanes and tv phones, all
contributing to a CAPEK-like vision of totalitarianism in a world gone
mad. [JC]

DUFF, DOUGLAS V(ALDER)
(1901- ) UK writer, usually of adventure novels for older boys, though
several of his titles are clearly addressed to an adult audience. Not all
his sf or fantasy has been traced; those that have include The Horned
Crescent (1936), Jack Harding's Quest (1939), Peril on the Amazon (1946),
Atomic Valley (1947), The Man from Outer Space (1953) and The Nuclear
Castle Story (1958). Of these, perhaps the most interesting in Jack
Harding's Quest, a LOST WORLD story set in the Middle East, where a Lost
Tribe of Israel has been hoarding the Seven Horns of Joshua; the eponymous
young protagonist, with the aid of some scientific boffins, establishes
the reality of the Horns, which have the effect of disrupting matter at
the molecular level. This effect is acoustically recorded; and the Horns
are then unilaterally destroyed by the British, to keep the secret from
the German foe. The Lost Tribe knuckles under. [JC]

DUFFY, MAUREEN (PATRICIA)
(1933- ) UK writer whose novels tend to explore marginalized figures,
many of them women viewed from a FEMINIST angle; typical is the
protagonist of Gor Saga (1981) - televised as First Born in 1988 - who is
the child of a gorilla mother fertilized by human semen ( Hyperlink to:
APES AND CAVEMEN), and who grows into articulate adulthood in an
alienating NEAR-FUTURE UK. MD's nonfictional The Erotic World of Faery
(1972) takes a determinedly Freudian view of that subject. [JC]See also:
ANTHROPOLOGY; GENETIC ENGINEERING; WOMEN SF WRITERS.

DUKA, IVO
Joint pseudonym of emigre Czech writers Ivo Duchac

DUKE, MADELAINE (ELIZABETH)
(1925- ) UK writer and physician, born in Switzerland of Dutch parents,
active under her own name and at least two pseudonyms in a variety of
genres including sf novels (which she describes as "cartoons"). Claret,
Sandwiches and Sin: A Cartoon (1964 as by Maxim Donne; 1966 as by MED)
depicts a world insecurely amalgamated, after a nuclear conflict, into two
political divisions: Africa and the Rest of the World. Any politician who
risks war is eliminated by an underground organization. The protagonist of
the sequel, This Business of Bomfog: A Cartoon (1967), is "Maxim Donne" -
author of Claret, Sandwiches and Sin, a successful novel that has inspired
the assassination of a number of world leaders. In 1989, Bomfog
(Brotherhood-of-Man-Fatherhood-of-God), the organization responsible, now
runs the UK in a fashion MED depicts in somewhat hectic language as
DYSTOPIAN. Flashpoint (1982) features a scientist who plans to use a new
nuclear power system to enforce global sanity. [JC]

Du MAURIER, DAPHNE
(1907-1989) UK writer, granddaughter of George DU MAURIER, famous for
dark-hued romances (like Rebecca [1938]), usually set in Cornwall and
often - like her first, The Loving Spirit (1931), a ghost story - tinged
with the supernatural; drugs send the protagonist of The House on the
Strand (1969) into medieval Cornwall. Her one sf novel, Rule Britannia
(1972), subjects a NEAR-FUTURE Cornwall to US INVASION, during which the
natives rebel against the tasteless Yankees. Among DDM's short stories are
"The Birds", from The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories (coll
1952; vt Kiss Me Again, Stranger 1953 US; vt The Birds and Other Stories
1963 UK), which was made by Alfred Hitchcock into The BIRDS (1963), and
"Don't Look Now", from Not After Midnight (coll 1971; vt Don't Look Now
1971 US), which Nicholas Roeg filmed as Don't Look Now (1973). [JC]Other
works include: The Breaking Point: Eight Stories (coll 1959; vt The Blue
Lenses, and Other Stories 1970); Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
(coll 1976); Classics of the Macabre (coll 1987; vt Daphne Du Maurier's
Classics of the Macabre 1987 US).

Du MAURIER, GEORGE (LOUIS PALMELLA BUSSON)
(1834-1896) UK illustrator, cartoonist and writer, known almost
exclusively today as the author of Trilby (1894), whose famous villain,
Svengali, is a preternaturally competent mesmerist. The progatonists of
GDM's first novel, Peter Ibbetson (1891), share each other's dreams, in
which they return to their idyllic childhood. His last novel, The Martian
(1897 US), lackadaisically tells through hindsight the life story of a
sensitive but mysterious Spiritualist who turns out to have been a Martian
all her life. [JC]Other works: A Legend of Camelot (coll 1898), whose
title poem is mildly fantasticated.See also: PSI POWERS.

DUNCAN, BRUCE
Irving A. GREENFIELD.

DUNCAN, DAVE
Working name of Scottish-born petroleum geologist and writer David John
Duncan (1933- ), in Canada from 1955. His singleton novels have divided
fairly evenly between fantasy and sf. The first, A Rose-Red City (1987
US), complicatedly puts its 20th-century protagonist into a walled UTOPIA,
where demons (and the Minotaur) oppose his attempts to extract Ariadne
from the world. Shadow (1987 US) is a SCIENCE-FANTASY tale of dynasties in
trouble on a strange planet "light-years hence". West of January (1989 US)
is a crowded PLANETARY ROMANCE set on a world whose day and orbit are of
approximately the same duration and in which a not particularly attractive
hero - his name is Knobil and, as the book is at times comical in intent,
the K can be assumed silent - has adventures all day long, some of which
carry subtle stings in their tails. Strings (1990 US), also sf, features a
significantly naive protagonist caught up in events the book's readers
understand better than he, as a desperately terminal Earth must be
escaped, via superstring transport, and a princess must be succoured. DD's
work has all the flamboyance of tales written strictly for escape, but (as
has been noted by critics) never for long allows his readers to forget
what kind of problems he is inviting them to dodge. His most virtuoso
passages seem almost brazenly to dance with despair. [JC]Other works: The
Seventh Sword fantasy sequence, comprising The Reluctant Swordsman (1988
US), The Coming of Wisdom (1988 US) and The Destiny of the Sword (1988
US); the Man of his Word fantasy sequence, comprising Magic Casement (1990
US), Faery Lands Forlorn (1991 US), Perilous Seas (1991 US) and Emperor
and Clown (1992); Hero! (1991 US), an sf juvenile; The Reaver Road (1992),
a fantasy.

DUNCAN, DAVID
(1913- ) US writer of popular fiction in several genres, perhaps as well
known for his few sf novels as for any other work, though his first novel
with an sf content, The Shade of Time (1946), which deals with "atomic
displacement", was (as he records) accepted for publication only after
Hiroshima. His books of the 1950s, more widely distributed within the sf
markets, have been better remembered, though he also scripted several
films, including The TIME MACHINE (1960), and wrote a screenplay for The
OUTER LIMITS . Dark Dominion (1954) is a well told melodrama concerning a
new element, magellanium, which varies in weight according to the position
of the star Sirius, and which is finally used to power a spaceship. Beyond
Eden (1955; vt Another Tree in Eden 1956 UK) contrasts different routes
towards fulfilment - materially, through a vast water-making project, and
spiritually, via crystals that expand humankind's nature in the direction
of gestalt empathy. Occam's Razor (1957) explores, within the context of a
threatening nuclear war, the impact of the arrival of two humans - though
one is horned-from a PARALLEL WORLD. DD has since fallen silent. [JC]Other
work: The Madrone Tree (1949), a fantasy.See also: DIMENSIONS;
MATHEMATICS.

DUNCAN, RONALD (FREDERICK HENRY)
(1914-1982) UK novelist, poet and playwright; Benjamin Britten's
librettist for the opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946). He was generally
best known for works outside the sf field. The Dull Ass's Hoof (coll 1941)
contains some fantasy plays. Some of the stories in The Perfect Mistress
and Other Stories (coll 1969), A Kettle of Fish (coll 1971), The Tale of
Tails (coll 1975) and The Uninvited Guest (coll 1981) are fables with sf
components. RD's sf novella, The Last Adam (1952 chap), features a last
man who, being something of a misogynist, comes across the last woman and
leaves her. [JC]Other works: This Way to the Tomb (1946) and The Death of
Satan (1955), fantasy plays; Mr and Mrs Mouse (1977), a fairy tale.

DUNE
Film (1984). Dino De Laurentiis/Universal. Dir David Lynch, starring Kyle
MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Sting, Sean Young, many
others. Screenplay Lynch, based on DUNE (fixup 1965) by Frank HERBERT. 137
mins. Colour.Seldom has a big-budget genre film been so execrated by fans
and film critics alike. Certainly its narrative is confused to the point
of incoherence, showing signs of last-minute, lunatic cutting. Certainly
the many-layered story of Herbert's original, with its complex
intellectual structure (occasionally also vague), is here largely reduced
to melodrama. Certainly the distilled grotesquerie with which Baron
Harkonnen and his nephew Feyd Rautha (McMillan and Sting) are envisaged
belongs to a world more disgusting than anything invented by Herbert.
Certainly the final three-quarters of a long novel is reduced to a
ludicrously fast-moving half-hour or so. Yet the film was, after all, made
by David Lynch, master of weirdness, whose previous films had been
Eraserhead (1976) and The Elephant Man (1980), and whose subsequent works
would include Blue Velvet (1986) and the pilot of Twin Peaks (1989) -
remarkable movies all. It may be time to reappraise D, which Lynch clearly
conceived in terms of emblematic tableaux, like scenes from some stately,
hieratic pageant. Much of the production design - but not the sandworms -
was wonderfully original and exotic; the camerawork (by Freddie Francis)
made confident, artistic use of light and shade, glowing golds and deep
shadows. However bad the film may have been in some respects, the
neo-Baroque of the whole thing, not least in the Harkonnen sequences, is
one of the most interesting attempts yet to capture a look and a feeling
for sf that does not simply depend (as Herbert's original did not) on
technological gimmickry. Bits of this bad film are close to masterful.
[PN]See also: STEAMPUNK.

DUNE DIES
Fans were waiting for the movie version of Frank Herbert's novel, Dune,
for years. Finally, in 1984, the film opened. It was written and directed
by David Lynch. The general consensus of critics and fans - and certainly
the studio - was that Dune bombed. Why did it fail? Most people blame the
film's producer, Dino De Laurentis, better known for his 1976 remake of
King Kong. De Laurentis insisted that the film be cut from about three
hours to two hours and seventeen minutes, making its last half almost
incoherent.But many science fiction fans had their doubts about Dune's
metamorphosis anyway. Big budget films typically thrive on action and
adventure. And Frank Herbert's popular novel may have just been too dark
and too complex to translate well into film.

DUNN, J.R.
(? - ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Long Knives" for L. Ron
Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1987) ed A.J. BUDRYS; a later
story, "Crux Gammata" (1992) is an interesting HITLER WINS tale. This Side
of Judgment (1994), JRD's first novel, posits a CYBERPUNK-colored future
America whose pyrrhic military victory over a cabal of South American drug
dealers and Leftist dictators has driven the country even further down the
road to ENTROPY and social despair. Exploiters and victims of this
scenario are the "imps", humans with chip-implants who (while themselves
suffering ineradicable information overload) manage (while attempting to
take over the government) to scare Federal agencies into a violent
showdown. In the end, action dominates; but JRD gives a sense of being
prepared to continue speculating. [JC]

DUNN, KATHERINE (KAREN)
(1945- ) US writer, teacher and radio personality whose third novel, Geek
Love (1989), is a densely told tale of a family which breeds its own
freaks through a kind of GENETIC ENGINEERING; in the end the book reads,
however, not as sf, but as an extremely expert FABULATION on the
primordial theme of the family romance. KD's novel is not to be confused
with The Geek (1969) by Alice Louise Ramirez, which is narrated by a
chicken. [JC]

DUNN, PHILIP M.
[r] Saul DUNN.

DUNN, SAUL
Pseudonym used by UK writer and publisher Philip M. Dunn (1946- ) for the
original publication of his books in the UK, though he used his own name
for their US release; he was also the director of Pierrot Publishing, a
packaging-cum-publishing firm which became insolvent in 1981, owing large
sums. SD was reported to have moved to India for religious reasons.
Releases generated by the company included Brian W. ALDISS's Brothers of
the Head (1977), Peter DICKINSON's The Flight of Dragons (1979) and Harry
HARRISON's Great Balls of Fire! A History of Sex in Science Fiction
Illustration (1977); all were heavily illustrated. SD wrote two
SPACE-OPERA sequences, the Steeleye books - The Coming of Steeleye (1976),
Steeleye - The Wideways (1976) and Steeleye-Waterspace (1976) - and the
Cabal tales - The Cabal (1978; 1981 US under his own name), The Black Moon
(1978; 1982 US under his own name) and The Evangelist (1979; 1982 US under
his own name). [JC]

DUNNE, J(OHN) W(ILLIAM)
(1875-1949) UK writer and engineer, responsible for designing the first
UK military aeroplane c1907. Though his two fantasies-The Jumping Lions of
Borneo (1937 chap) and the more ambitious An Experiment with St George
(1939) - are of some mild interest, JWD is now remembered almost
exclusively for his theories about the nature of time, which he developed
in order to explain his sense that dreams are often precognitive. In An
Experiment with Time (1927; rev 1929; rev 1934) he began to articulate his
appealing thesis that time was not a linear flow but a sort of geography,
accessible to the dreaming mind. In later books, such as The Serial
Universe (1934), The New Immortality (1938), Nothing Dies (1940) and the
posthumous Intrusions? (1955), he ludicrously sophisticated the theory,
postulating various numbered levels of Time leading by an infinite regress
to God; but his early work resonated perfectly with the time-hauntedness
of interbellum UK writers from E.F. BENSON to the children's author Alison
Uttley (1884-1976) to - most famously - John Buchan (1875-1940), whose
time-travel novel, The Gap in the Curtain (1932), is clearly argued in
JWD's terms; and J.B. PRIESTLEY, whose Time Plays are indebted to JWD, and
whose nonfictional Over the Long High Wall: Some Reflections and
Speculations on Life, Death and Time (1972) guardedly advocates JWD's more
fruitful intuitions. [JC]See also: DIMENSIONS; TIME TRAVEL.

DUNSANY, LORD
Working name of Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), 18th Baron
Dunsany, prolific Irish author of stories, novels, essays and plays.
Though primarily a writer of FANTASY, he is of sf interest through the
widespread influence of his language and imagery. Late in life he wrote
one sf novel, The Last Revolution (1951), about MACHINES in revolt. His
influence, especially on writers of HEROIC FANTASY, was strong from almost
the beginning of his long career, when he published a series of FANTASY
collections whose contents are linked by imagery and reference: The Gods
of Pegana (coll of linked stories 1905), Time and the Gods (coll 1906),
The Sword of Welleran (coll 1908), which contains the famous The Fortress
Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth (1910 chap), A Dreamer's Tales (coll
1910), The Book of Wonder: A Chronicle of Little Adventures at the Edge of
the World (coll 1912), Fifty-One Tales (coll 1915; vt The Food of Death:
Fifty-One Tales 1974 US), and Tales of Wonder (coll 1916: vt The Last Book
of Wonder 1916 US). The stories in these intermittently brilliant volumes
made creative use of influences from Wilde and Yeats through William
MORRIS - along with the very specific effect of the play The Darling of
the Gods (1902) by David Belasco (1859-1931) and John L. Long (1861-1927),
with its misty fake-oriental setting. Through their sustained
otherworldliness and their muscular delicacy, these stories in turn
exerted a potent influence on later writers.In his second phase as a
fantasist - after a rather ostentatious spurning of the genre during WWI -
LD turned to novels like The Chronicles of Don Rodriguez (1922; vt Don
Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley 1922 US), The King of Elfland's
Daughter (1924) and The Charwoman's Shadow (1926); the second of these did
much to give geographical reality to the secondary universe ( J.R.R.
TOLKIEN) of high fantasy. His third phase consists of the Jorkens CLUB
STORIES: The Travel Tales of Mr Joseph Jorkens (coll 1931), Jorkens
Remembers Africa (coll 1934 US; vt Mr Jorkens Remembers Africa 1934 UK),
Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (coll 1940), The Fourth Book of Jorkens (coll
1947) and Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey (coll 1954). Along with works by
Robert Louis STEVENSON and G.K. CHESTERTON, these tales focused the
attention of sf and fantasy writers upon the late Victorian and Edwardian
club story as a suggestive mode for storytelling; Arthur C. CLARKE,
Sterling LANIER and Spider ROBINSON are among the many who have written in
it. LD's work as a fantasist is of high intrinsic merit, and his influence
is pervasive. [JC]Other works: Tales of War (coll 1918); Unhappy Far-Off
Things (coll 1919); Tales of Three Hemispheres (coll 1919 US); two macabre
novels, The Blessing of Pan (1927) and The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933);
My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936 ), in which the Dean recalls a past life;
The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950), in which a man's mind is
transferred into an animal's body;Rory and Bran (1936), a protagonist of
which is a dog; The Man who Ate the Phoenix (coll 1949); The Little Tales
of Smethers (coll 1952); The Sword of Welleran and Other Tales of
Enchantment (coll 1954; contents differ from the 1908 vol); 3 compilations
ed Lin CARTER, At the Edge of the World (coll 1970), Beyond the Fields We
Know (coll 1972) and Over the Hills and Far Away (coll 1974); Gods, Men
and Ghosts (coll 1972) ed E.F. BLEILER; The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer
and Other Fantasms (coll 1980 US); also numerous pamphlets and plays.About
the author: Lord Dunsany: A Biography (1972) by Mark Amory; Lord Dunsany:
King of Dreams (1959) by Hazel Littlefield; Literary Swordsmen and
Sorcerers (1976) by L. Sprague DE CAMP; Pathways to Elfland: The Writings
of Lord Dunsany (1989) by Darrell SCHWEITZER; "Lord Dunsany: The Career of
a Fantaisiste"by S.T. Joshi in his The Weird Tale (1990);Pathways to
Elfland (1989) by Darrell SCHWEITZER; Lord Dunsany: A Bibliograpy (1993)
by J.T. Joshi and Schweitzer..See also: SWORD AND SORCERY.

DUNSTAN, ANDREW
[s] A. Bertram CHANDLER.

DURRELL, LAWRENCE (GEORGE)
(1912-1990) UK poet and novelist best known for the Alexandria Quartet
(1957-60). His sf novel sequence, Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970),
assembled as The Revolt of Aphrodite (omni 1974), subjects sf material to
intensely literary scrutiny. In the first volume, Merlin, a burgeoning
multinational corporation, co-opts the protagonist, Felix Charlock, into
constructing a super- COMPUTER, which can predict the future and which
drives him to madness; in the second volume, Felix is cured in order to
create an ANDROID lady - echoing an LD obsession - perfectly duplicating a
destroyed lover of the boss of Merlin; but the android is also destroyed
in a NEAR-FUTURE world choked with evil and images of corruption. [JC]See
also: MYTHOLOGY.

DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS
US PULP MAGAZINE. 12 issues, July 1934-July 1935; published by Popular
Publications; ed Rogers Terrill. Each issue contained a novel by Robert
Sidney BOWEN Jr in which Dusty and his sidekicks fought off the menace of
the Black Invaders, led by an Asian warlord bent on world domination. The
magazine, genuine NEAR-FUTURE sf, was a revival of a more conventional
aviation pulp, Battle Birds, in an attempt to pull in the readership of
the previous title for what was in fact a brand new magazine with a new
hero and a new, futuristic storyline. It continued the numeration of
Battle Birds, beginning with vol 5 #4 and ending with vol 8 #3. Five of
the stories were reprinted as paperbacks in 1966 (for details BOWEN).
[FHP/MJE]

DVORKIN, DANIEL
[r] David DVORKIN.

DVORKIN, DAVID
(1943- ) UK-born author, long in the USA, whose first novel of strong
interest, after the unremarkable The Children of Shiny Mountain (1977; vt
Shiny Mountain 1978 UK) and The Green God (1979), was Time for Sherlock
Holmes * (1983). This RECURSIVE tale takes the detective, who has found
the secret of eternal youth, through a tortuous plot (much TIME TRAVEL is
involved) from the time of H.G. WELLS (concerned at Professor Moriarty's
theft of the Time Machine to seesaw through the eons, doing evil) to a
Martian future where, after a DYSTOPIAN interlude, he prepares to lead
humanity to the stars. Unfortunately, the telling is somewhat flat, an
ailment of style which afflicted DD through the next several books. Budspy
(1987), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD featuring a victorious Germany ( HITLER
WINS), is greyly half-convincing; and The Seekers (1988) and Central Heat
(1988), both set in the same universe, again lack a sense of full
conviction, though much of the detail-work is, as usual, applied with
considerable intelligence. Central Heat is plotted with all DD's love of
intricacy: ALIENS have decided that Earth has failed to breed decent
citizens and so abduct the Sun, although ensuring that our planet
ricochets into an orbit around Jupiter and Saturn, which have been thrown
together; properly instructed as to how to go about igniting the joined
gas giants into a tiny new sun, the remnants of humanity begin to learn
how to cope. With Ursus (1989) and Insatiable (1993), DD shifted into
horror. [JC]Other works: Three STAR TREK ties: The Trellisane
Confrontation * (1984), Timetrap * (1988) and Star Trek: The Next
Generation #8: The Captain's Honor * (1989) with Daniel Dvorkin (1969- ),
his son.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

DWIGGINS, W(ILLIAM) A(DDISON)
(1880-1956) US writer on typography and, through his association with the
Mergenthaler Linotype Company, designer of several well known typefaces,
including Electra and Caledonia. He is known within the sf field for
designing and illustrating the luxurious 1931 edition of H.G. WELLS's THE
TIME MACHINE. His sf play, Millennium 1 (1945) - published in an edition
he designed and illustrated - depicts an ambiguous UTOPIA in which
machines have revolted and humans must fight to recover their hegemony.
[JC]

DWYER, DEANNE
Dean R. KOONTZ.

DWYER, JAMES FRANCIS
(1874-1952) US writer, most of whose books - like The White Waterfall
(1912), The Spotted Panther (1913) and the stories assembled in "Breath of
the Jungle" (coll 1915) - are Oriental fantasies of little interest,
though Evelyn: Something More than a Story (1929) translates the prurient
primitivism of the earlier books into the future, and Hespamora (1935 UK)
combines elements of DYSTOPIAN satire with an incursion of pagan deities.
The Spillane series, The Lady with Feet of Gold (1937 UK) and The City of
Cobras (1938 UK), returned to JFD's old haunts. [JC]Other works: Cold-Eyes
(1934).

DWYER, K.R.
Dean R. KOONTZ.

DYE, CHARLES
(1927-1955) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Last Orbit" for
AMZ in 1950. He was active for the next half-decade, soon publishing his
only sf novel, Prisoner in the Skull (1952), in which ordinary Homo
sapiens and a form of SUPERMAN engage in thriller-like confrontations. He
was married briefly (1951-3) to Katherine MACLEAN, who wrote "The Man who
Staked the Stars" (1952) and "Syndrome Johnny" (1951) under his name. The
latter story contains an amazingly early account of a
genetic-recombination technique (gene splicing), in which a "piggyback"
virus transports genetic material (a silicon-using gene) into human cells.
[JC/PN]

DYER, ALFRED
[r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED.

DYING EARTH
A not uncommon category of sf story which has now developed its own
melancholy mythology. FAR FUTURE. [JC]

DYNAMIC SCIENCE FICTION
US PULP MAGAZINE published by Columbia Publications; ed R.A.W. LOWNDES. 6
issues, Dec 1952-Jan 1954. Much of the fiction DSF printed was mediocre,
but it published 2 2-part critical articles of some note by James E. GUNN:
"The Philosophy of SF" (Mar-June 1953) and "The Plot-Forms of SF" (Oct
1953-Jan 1954). 3 numbered issues were reprinted in the UK in 1953. [BS]

DYNAMIC SCIENCE STORIES
US PULP MAGAZINE, a short-lived companion to MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES. 2
issues, Feb 1939 and Apr/May 1939, published by Western Fiction Publishing
Corp.; ed Robert O. Erisman. #1 featured the novel Lord of Tranerica
(1966) by Stanton A. COBLENTZ; #2 included stories by L. Sprague DE CAMP
and Manly Wade WELLMAN. DSS was an average pulp magazine with no
distinctive qualities. #1 appeared as a UK reprint in 1939. [MJE]

DYSON, FREEMAN J(OHN)
(1923- ) UK-born theoretical physicist and FRS; professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, since 1953, and now a US citizen.
FJD's main work has been in quantum field theory, but he is well known in
sf for the concept of the DYSON SPHERE, which he introduced in a short
paper for Science in 1960 (vol 131 p1667). In this paper, which was
concerned with locating and communicating with extraterrestrial
civilizations, Dyson argued that any such civilization would probably be
millions of years old and that Malthusian pressure would have led to its
energy requirements being equal to the total output of radiation from its
star. It would therefore reconstruct its solar system so as to form an
artificial biosphere completely enclosing its sun. This and related
schemes, like the basic notion behind his RINGWORLD (1970), are discussed
by Larry NIVEN in his article "Bigger than Worlds" (1974; reprinted in A
Hole in Space coll 1974). An sf novel which makes use of an actual Dyson
Sphere is Bob SHAW's Orbitsville (1975). The "Cuckoo "inFarthest Star
(1975) by Frederik POHL and Jack WILLIAMSON is revealed in the sequel,
Wall Around a Star (1983), to be a Dyson Sphere.FJD's theorizing has many
times gone beyond his own speciality to cover topics as diverse as the
Greenhouse Effect, galactic COLONIZATION, GENETIC ENGINEERING and the use
of the SOLAR WIND for space-sailing. His many essays are a treasure trove
for sf writers, some being collected in Infinite in All Directions (coll
1988 US). His set of autobiographical sketches, Disturbing the Universe
(1979 US), tells entertaining tales of intellectual adventure. It was a
student of Dyson's who made headlines in 1976 by designing a workable
nuclear weapon using only published sources. [TSu/PN]See also: ENTROPY;
XENOBIOLOGY.

DYSON SPHERE
Item of sf TERMINOLOGY; named for a concept put forward by the physicist
Freeman J. DYSON.

DYSTOPIAS
The word "dystopia" is the commonly used antonym of "eutopia" ( UTOPIAS)
and denotes that class of hypothetical societies containing images of
worlds worse than our own. An early user of the term was John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873), in a parliamentary speech in 1868, but its recent
fashionableness probably stems from its use in Quest for Utopia (1952) by
Glenn Negley (1907-1988) and J. Max Patrick (1908- ). Anthony BURGESS
argued in 1985 (1978) that "cacotopia" would be a more apt term.Dystopian
images are almost invariably images of future society, pointing fearfully
at the way the world is supposedly going in order to provide urgent
propaganda for a change in direction. As hope for a better future grows,
the fear of disappointment inevitably grows with it, and when any vision
of a future utopia incorporates a manifesto for political action or
belief, opponents of that action or belief will inevitably attempt to show
that its consequences are not utopian but horrible. The very first work
listed in I.F. CLARKE's bibliography of The Tale of the Future (3rd edn
1978) is a tract of 1644 warning of the terrible disaster which would
follow were the monarchy to be restored.Dystopian images began to
proliferate in the last decades of the 19th century. Utopian and dystopian
images are contrasted in the rival cities of Frankville and Stahlstadt in
The Begum's Fortune (1879; trans 1880) by Jules VERNE. The greedy
materialism which has created Stahlstadt is also the underlying ideology
of H.C. MARRIOTT-WATSON's Erchomenon (1879). Walter BESANT produced two
significant early dystopias in The Revolt of Man (1882), in which women (
WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION) rule with disastrous consequences,
and The Inner House (1888), in which IMMORTALITY has led to social
stagnation. The great utopian H.G. WELLS produced his images of dystopia,
too - forecasts of what the world must be like if the forces of socialism
did not triumph - in "A Story of the Days to Come" (1897) and When the
Sleeper Wakes (1899; rev vt The Sleeper Awakes, 1910). He also produced
the first ALIEN dystopia in his description of Selenite society in THE
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901). Robert Hugh BENSON's Lord of the World
(1907) is a hysterical protest against secularism, humanism and socialism
which ends with the apocalypse.The single most prolific stimulus to the
production of dystopian visions has been the political polarization of
capitalism and socialism. Anti-capitalist dystopias include The Iron Heel
(1907) by Jack LONDON, The Air Trust (1915) by George Allan ENGLAND, and
Useless Hands (1920; trans 1926) by Claude FARRERE. Anti-socialist
dystopias, which are more numerous, include The Unknown Tomorrow (1910) by
William LE QUEUX, Crucible Island (1919) by Conde B. PALLEN, Unborn
Tomorrow (1933) by John KENDALL, Anthem (1938) by Ayn RAND and The Great
Idea (1951; vt Time Will Run Back) by Henry HAZLITT. Anti-fascist
dystopias include Land under England (1935) by Joseph O'NEILL, The Wild
Goose Chase (1937) by Rex WARNER and The Lost Traveller (1943) by Ruthven
TODD. Anti-German dystopias from before and after the rise of the Nazi
Party include Owen GREGORY's Meccania (1918), Milo HASTINGS's City of
Endless Night (1920) and Swastika Night (1937) by Murray Constantine (
Katharine BURDEKIN) (see also HITLER WINS).Although these works are
emotional reactions against ideas which seem various, the basic fears
which they express are very similar. The emphasis may differ, but the
central features of dystopia are ever present: the oppression of the
majority by a ruling elite (which varies only in the manner of its
characterization, not in its actions), and the regimentation of society as
a whole (which varies only in its declared ends, not in its actual
processes). In his attempt to imagine the "rationalized" state of the
Selenites, Wells took as his dystopian model the ant-nest ( HIVE-MINDS)
and this has seemed the epitome of dystopian organization to many other
writers. J.D. BERESFORD's and Esme Wynne-Tyson's The Riddle of the Tower
(1944) suggests that the fundamental danger facing society is "Automatism"
- the trend toward the victory of organic society over the individual -
whatever political philosophy is invoked to justify it. The most detailed
analysis of this anxiety, and perhaps the most impressively ruthless of
all dystopias, is My (trans as We 1924) by Yevgeny ZAMIATIN, and the most
luridly horrible development of it is to be found in George ORWELL's
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), which in part expressed Orwell's despair of
the UK working class and its capacity to revolt (or even be
revolted).Because animosity against specific political programmes was the
most important force provoking early dystopian visions, the tradition did
not immediately engage in contradictory argument the main basis for
utopian optimism, which is a more generalized faith in the idea of
progress, both social and technological. It was not long, though, before
there appeared dystopian images reflecting an emotional reaction against
technological advance. The world of E.M. FORSTER's "The Machine Stops"
(1909) is perhaps the first dystopia created by technological
sophistication; the story's argument is halfhearted, concentrating on the
question of what would happen when the MACHINES broke down rather than on
the horrors of living with them while they were still functioning. A
confident assertion that scientific progress would make the world a worse
place to live in because it would allow society's power groups more
effectively to oppress others was made by Bertrand RUSSELL in Icarus, or
The Future of Science (1924), his reply to J.B.S. HALDANE's optimistic
Daedalus (1924). Aldous HUXLEY's satirical dystopia BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932)
is also an ideological reply to Daedalus, raising awkward questions about
the quality of life in a LEISURE society. S. Fowler WRIGHT's The New Gods
Lead (coll 1932) is a scathing indictment of the values of technocracy and
"the utopia of comforts". The general pessimism of the UK SCIENTIFIC
ROMANCE in this period was countered mainly by hopes of transcendence (via
the evolution of a new and better species of mankind) rather than by faith
in political reform.This suspicion of technology, though running directly
counter to Hugo GERNSBACK's optimism for an "Age of Power Freedom", is
surprisingly widespread in early GENRE SF. In "Paradise and Iron" (1930)
by Miles J. BREUER a mechanical brain established to coordinate a
mechanistic utopia becomes a tyrant. In "City of the Living Dead" (1930)
by Laurence MANNING and Fletcher PRATT, machines that simulate real
experience allow people to live in dream worlds, sustained by mechanical
"wombs", and thereby bring about the total stagnation of society.
Scepticism in regard to technological miracles is a hallmark of the work
of David H. KELLER, whose dystopian fantasies include "The Revolt of the
Pedestrians" (1928), in which automobilists who have lost the power of
self-locomotion rule oppressively over mere pedestrians. Most stories of
this kind feature some kind of rebellion against the adverse circumstances
described. The reversion to a simpler way of life is celebrated by Keller
in "The Metal Doom" (1932) as enthusiastically as it is in the
hysterically technophobic Gay Hunter (1934) by J. Leslie
MITCHELL.Revolution against a dystopian regime was to become a staple plot
of GENRE SF, partly because such a formula offered far more melodramatic
potential than utopian planning. The standard scenario involves an
oppressive totalitarian state which maintains its dominance and stability
by means of futuristic technology, but which is in the end toppled by
newer technologies exploited by revolutionaries. The standard genre-sf
answer to the problem posed by Russell in Icarus is, therefore, that
elites empowered by technology will lose their interest in further
technological progress, and will probably try to suppress it - with the
result that its clandestinely developed fruits will become the instruments
of their overthrow. Examples from the 1940s of this formula are "If This
Goes On ..." (1940) and Sixth Column (1941; 1949) by Robert A. HEINLEIN,
GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943; 1950) by Fritz LEIBER, Tarnished Utopia (1943;
1956) by Malcolm JAMESON and Renaissance (1944; 1951; vt Man of Two
Worlds) by Raymond F. JONES. In the SF MAGAZINES of the 1950s this formula
became more refined and increasingly stylized. There appeared a whole
generation of sf novels in which individual power groups come to dominate
society, shaping it to their special interests. Advertising executives run
the world in the archetype of this subspecies, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953)
by Frederik POHL and C.M. KORNBLUTH; insurance companies are in charge in
Preferred Risk (1955) by Edson McCann (Pohl and Lester DEL REY);
supermarkets in HELL'S PAVEMENT (1955; vt Analogue Men) by Damon KNIGHT;
racketeers in The Syndic (1953) by Kornbluth; doctors in Caduceus Wild
(1959; rev 1978) by Ward MOORE and Robert Bradford; and a cult of
hedonists in The Joy Makers (fixup 1961) by James E. GUNN. All these
novels are, in a sense, gaudy fakes that use dystopian images for
melodramatic convenience; they select their villains with a vigorous
disregard for plausibility and a cheerful animus against some personal
bete noire. They tend to be ABSURDIST exaggerations rather than serious
political statements. In this period genre sf produced only one genuine
dystopian novel, the classic FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953) by Ray BRADBURY, which
leaves its ruling elite anonymous in order to concentrate on the means by
which oppression and regimentation are facilitated, with the powerful key
image of the firemen whose job is to burn books. In many of the lesser
genre-sf novels of the 1950s, revolution against an oppressive and
stagnant society is seen as a difficult irrelevance, escape by SPACESHIP
becoming a key image.Outside the sf magazines the post-WWII period
produced a remarkable series of very varied dystopian novels - remarkable
not only for their diversity and characteristic intensity but also for a
tendency to black comedy. Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1948) is an
anti-scientific polemic; Evelyn WAUGH's Love among the Ruins (1953) is a
vitriolic political satire; Bernard WOLFE's LIMBO (1952) plays in macabre
fashion with the idea of (literal) "disarmament". Even the more earnest
works, like Gerald HEARD's enigmatic Doppelgangers (1947), SARBAN's THE
SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952), David KARP's One (1953), L.P. HARTLEY's Facial
Justice (1960) and Anthony Burgess's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962), possess a
curious surreal quality. Many of these novels are neither accusations
directed at particular social forces nor attempts to analyse the nature of
the dystopian state, but seem to be products of a new kind of incipient
despair; only a few-notably Doppelgangers - offer a significant note of
hope in their account of rebellion against evil circumstance. This, it
appears, was a period of history in which US-UK society lost its faith in
the probability of a better future, and the dystopian image was
established as an actual pattern of expectation rather than as a literary
warning device.Genre sf soon followed this lead - and so prominent was the
dystopian image in magazine sf that the transition from fakery to
"realism" was very easily achieved. During the 1960s a whole series of
reasons for believing in a dystopian future were discovered-to justify
rather than to cause the pessimistic outlook typical of the time.
OVERPOPULATION - a theme ignored since the days of Malthus - began to
inspire dystopian horror stories, most impressively in MAKE ROOM! MAKE
ROOM! (1966) by Harry HARRISON, STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968) by John BRUNNER
and The World Inside (1971) by Robert SILVERBERG. The awful prospects of
POLLUTION and the destruction of the environment were extravagantly
detailed in Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972) and Philip WYLIE's The End
of the Dream (1972). When Alvin TOFFLER proposed in Future Shock (1970)
that the sheer pace of change threatened to make everyday life
unendurable, Brunner was able to complete a kind of "dystopian tetralogy",
following the two books cited above and The Jagged Orbit (1969) with THE
SHOCKWAVE RIDER (1975). Thomas M. DISCH's 334 (fixup 1972) is a dark
vision of the NEAR FUTURE in which human resilience is tested to the limit
by the stresses and strains of everyday life.Perhaps strangely, MAINSTREAM
dystopias of the late 1960s and 1970s seem rather weak-kneed compared to
those of the preceding decades. Michael FRAYN's A Very Private Life
(1968), Adrian MITCHELL's The Bodyguard (1970), Ira LEVIN's This Perfect
Day (1970) and Lawrence SANDERS's The Tomorrow File (1975) all seem
stereotyped. Perhaps there was little scope left for originality once the
most all-inclusive and ruthless image of a horrible and degenerate future
had been provided by William S. BURROUGHS in Nova Express (1964), or
perhaps it was simply that dystopian imagery came to be taken for granted
to such an extent that it could be deployed only in an almost flippant
manner - as by the CYBERPUNK writers of the 1980s. It is arguable that the
only new ground broken by literary dystopias of the 1970s and 1980s,
whether in the mainstream or in genre sf, related to FEMINIST images of
oppressive masculinity; notable examples include WALK TO THE END OF THE
WORLD (1974) by Suzy McKee CHARNAS, Woman at the Edge of Time (1976) by
Marge PIERCY, THE HANDMAID'S TALE (1985) by Margaret ATWOOD, and Bulldozer
Rising (1988) by ANNA LIVIA.The significance of the firm establishment of
a dystopian image of the future in literature should not be
underestimated. Literary images of the future are among the most
significant expressions of the beliefs and expectations we apply in real
life to the organization of our attitudes and actions. Notable studies of
dystopian fiction include From Utopia to Nightmare (1962) by Chad Walsh,
The Future as Nightmare (1967) by Mark R. HILLEGAS, and Science Fiction
and the New Dark Age by Harold L. Berger (1976). In New Maps of Hell
(1960) Kingsley AMIS argues that the dystopian tradition is the most
important strand in the tapestry of modern sf. A relevant theme anthology
is Bad Moon Rising (anth 1973) ed Thomas M. Disch. [BS]See also: DISASTER;
MEDIA LANDSCAPE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; SOCIOLOGY.


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