SF&F encyclopedia (F-F)FABIAN, STEPHEN E. (1930- ) US illustrator who worked in electronics until 1973. Self-trained as a freelance sf illustrator, he worked as a fan artist in the late 1960s. At the age of 43 he graduated to the professional SF MAGAZINES, mostly AMZ and Fantastic, with both cover art and interiors; he was less active in the 1980s than the 1970s. His art is distinctive, with a strong sense of formal design; it is for his dramatic interior black-and-white work, reminiscent of Virgil FINLAY's and prepared on textured coquille board, that he is best known. Book covers and interior illustrations include work for SMALL PRESSES such as Donald M. Grant, Byron PREISS and UNDERWOOD-MILLER. Books devoted to SEF's work include Letters Lovecraftian: An Alphabet of Illuminated Letters Inspired by the Works of the Late Master of the Weird Tale, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1974), Fantastic Nudes (1976) and Fantastic Nudes: 2nd Series (1976), which are collected with other material in Fantasy by Fabian (1978), The Best of Stephen Fabian (1976), More Fantasy by Fabian (1979) and Fabian in Color (1980). Many of these are ed and published Gerry de la Ree (? -1993), who also published much of Virgil Finlay's work. SEF has seven times been nominated for a HUGO. [PN/JG]See also: FANTASY. FABULATION We do not intend to make here - or to quote - any sustained theoretical argument about the nature of fabulation as the term was conceived by Robert SCHOLES in The Fabulators (1967) and amplified in his Structural Fabulation (1975). Our starting point must be GENRE SF, our central concern throughout this encyclopedia. In the entry on MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF we contrast the writers of genre sf, and the circumstances under which they write, with writers and their circumstances in what has come to be known as the mainstream. Here, we contrast the inherent nature of genre sf with the inherent nature of the central literature of the postmodern world ( POSTMODERNISM AND SF for a more sharply focused view of Postmodernism as a movement and a condition of mind). In using the single term "fabulation" instead of several - over and beyond Postmodernism, a critical roster might include ABSURDIST SF, Fictionality, MAGIC REALISM, SLIPSTREAM SF and Surfiction - we know we are offering a grossly oversimplified snapshot of the modern literary environment (or nests of environments). But the alternative would be to make a thousand individual choices, often inevitably controversial, as we attempted to label each non-"realistic" non-genre sf novel according to its precise place in an ever-shifting mosaic of prescriptive definitions. One term will have to do.Over the course of the 20th century, sf readers have grown used to thinking of genre sf as substantially different (in manner, in substance and in intention) from the great stream of realistic novels which increasingly dominated the English-speaking literary since the middle of the 18th century, a dominance which was challenged only in the first decades of our own era. Helped along by critics from within the genre, like Alexei and Cory PANSHIN in their contentious The World Beyond the Hill (1989), sf readers have further grown accustomed to thinking that it was genre sf itself that dethroned the mimetic novel from its position of dominance in 1926, and that the continued popularity of "realistic" fiction has been a kind of confidence game. We feel that something like the reverse is true: that genre sf - which we repeat is our central concern throughout this encyclopedia - is essentially a continuation of the mimetic novel, which it may have streamlined but certainly did not supplant; and that the onslaught of Modernism (and its successors) on the mimetic novel was also an onslaught upon the two essential assumptions governing genre sf.The first assumption is that both the "world" and the human beings who inhabit it can be seen whole, and described accurately, in words. The writers who created the great novels of the 19th century wrote in that assumption, and their novels were written as though they opened omniscient windows into reality. What the novel said and what was true were the same thing. Writers of genre sf have never abandoned this assumption. The explorations of Henry James (1843-1916) in the inherent unreliability of words - and the consequent unreliability of narrators - awoke no appreciative response in the mind of Hugo GERNSBACK, and it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that sf or fantasy was published (by writers like Jonathan Carroll, Samuel R. DELANY and Gene WOLFE) which accepted, 70 years late, the Jamesian intuition. In the world outside, however, after WWI, serious literary critics and readers almost universally granted the case of Modernist writers - nearly all of them the spiritual children of Henry James - that the "real" world could never be grasped whole, but that it was the high and difficult task of writers to forge fallen words into a semblance of the world, and to take an artificer's joy in the task of construction.The second assumption is that the "world"-whether or not it can be seen whole through the distorting glass of words - does in the end have a story which can be told. That story might be the knotty and problematical revelation of the truth of the Christian faith as unfolded in the later work of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965); or the March of Progress that Alexei and Cory Panshin claim to have traced, beginning with the planet-bound storytellers of the 19th century whose descendants bounded ever upwards toward the GOLDEN AGE OF SF, exploring the Galaxy en passant. What underlying story is being told is less important than the fact that, for writers of genre sf, some form of "meta-narrative" lies beneath the tale, ensuring the connectivity of things. The huge proliferation of future HISTORIES and novel sequences in genre sf does not simply reflect market strategies; it also represents a belief that the world is tellable. It is that belief, whether held by Modernists like T.S. Eliot (and Gene Wolfe) or pure genre writers like E.E. "Doc" SMITH, that has been called into question by the various Postmodernist movements, and which lies at the heart of most fabulations.We can now say what we mean in this encyclopedia by a "fabulation": a fabulation is any story which challenges the two main assumptions of genre sf: that the world can be seen; and that it can be told. We have chosen to use the term "fabulation" because it seems to us the best blanket description of the techniques employed by those writers who use sf devices to underline that double challenge, and whose work is thus at heart profoundly antipathetic to genre sf. A typical fabulation, then, is a tale whose telling is foregrounded in a way which emphasizes the inherent arbitrariness of the words we use, the stories we tell (Magic Realism, for instance, can be seen as a subversion of the "official" stories which are told by "rational" means and authorities), the characters whose true nature we can never plumb, the worlds we can never step into. (An unfriendly critic might say that fabulations are all means and no substance; but that is perhaps to miss the Postmodernist point that all previous stories were likewise, albeit secretly, all means and no "substance".) By foregrounding the means of telling a tale, fabulations articulate what might be called the fableness of things: the fableness of the world itself in some Magic Realism; the fableness of the political and social world in some Absurdist sf; the fableness of the aesthetic object in Postmodernism as a whole; and - finally - the fableness of fables in Fabulation itself.Authors whose works (or some of whose works) are, in our terms, fabulations include Paul ABLEMAN, Paul AUSTER, John BARTH, Donald BARTHELME, Adolfo BIOY CASARES, Michael BLUMLEIN, Jorge Luis BORGES, Bruce BOSTON, Scott BRADFIELD, Richard BRAUTIGAN, Christine BROOKE-ROSE, Ed BRYANT, David R. BUNCH, Anthony BURGESS, William BURROUGHS, Dino BUZZATI, Italo CALVINO, Angela CARTER, Jerome CHARYN, Barbara COMYNS, Robert COOVER, Arthur Byron COVER, Tom DE HAVEN, Don DELILLO, Rick DEMARINIS, Thomas M. DISCH, E.L. DOCTOROW, Katherine DUNN, Umberto ECO, George Alec EFFINGER, Carol EMSHWILLER, Steve ERICKSON, Karen Joy FOWLER, Carlos FUENTES, Felix GOTSCHALK, Alasdair GRAY, MacDonald HARRIS, M. John HARRISON, Carol HILL, William HJORTSBERG, Russell HOBAN, Trevor HOYLE, Harvey JACOBS, Langdon JONES, Franz KAFKA, Robert KELLY, Jerzy KOSINSKI, William KOTZWINKLE, Joseph MCELROY, Sheila MACLEOD, Michael MOORCOCK, Haruki MURAKAMI, Vladimir NABOKOV, Flann O'BRIEN, John Cowper POWYS, Christopher PRIEST, Thomas PYNCHON, Peter REDGROVE, Philip ROTH, Salman RUSHDIE, James SALLIS, Josephine SAXTON, Arno SCHMIDT, Lucius SHEPARD, John T. SLADEK, Norman SPINRAD, Stefan THEMERSON, David THOMSON, Boris VIAN, Gore VIDAL, William T. VOLLMANN, Alice WALKER, Rex WARNER, William WHARTON, Gene WOLFE, Stephen WRIGHT, Rudolf WURLITZER and Pamela ZOLINE. [JC]See also: OULIPO. FABULOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE, THE VYNALEZ ZKAZY. FACE OF FU MANCHU, THE Film (1965). Anglo-Amalgamated. Dir Don Sharp, starring Christopher Lee, Nigel Green, Tsai Chin, Howard Marion-Crawford, James Robertson Justice. Screenplay Harry Alan Towers, based on the characters created by Sax ROHMER. 96 mins. Colour.The first of a series of films produced by Harry Alan Towers in which Christopher Lee portrayed the oriental master-fiend, Tsai Chin played Fu's insidious daughter (renamed Lin Tang from Rohmer's Fah Lo Suee) and a succession of square-jawed heroes-Nigel Green, Douglas Wilmer, Richard Greene-played Sir Denis Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard. This first entry is by far the best of the batch, shot imaginatively on Irish locations which stand in for England and Tibet in the 1920s, and with devices reminiscent of the old movie serials, such as a gas which kills an entire village and a superexplosive, both deployed in Fu's scheme to control the world. Sharp's direction is fast-paced, with full rein given to the mild sadomasochism of the originals as victims are whipped or confined to cabinets which slowly fill with Thames water. This is a richly entertaining pastiche of the old style, although less delirious than The MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932), in which Fu was played by Boris Karloff. Sharp stayed with the series for Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), which was almost up to standard, but after the inferior Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), dir Jeremy Summers, the series was turned over to international hack Jesus Franco for the disastrous Castle of Fu Manchu (1968) and Blood of Fu Manchu (1968; vt Kiss and Kill). [KN] FAGAN, H(ENRY) A(LLAN) (1889-1963) South African judge and writer, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of South Africa 1956-9. In his sf novel Ninya (1956 UK) survivors of a crash landing on the Moon encounter many strange adventures. [JC] FAHRENHEIT 451 Film (1966). Anglo-Enterprise and Vineyard/Universal. Dir Francois Truffaut, starring Julie Christie, Oscar Werner, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring. Screenplay Truffaut, Jean-Louis Richard, based on FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953) by Ray BRADBURY. 112 mins. Colour.Bradbury's angry parable is about a future in which all books are banned. The hero (Werner) is a member of the Fire Brigade, whose function is not to put out fires but to burn books. He first questions the regime and then rebels totally, incinerating the fire chief instead of the books, escaping from the city and joining a rural community whose members are each memorizing a book, word for word, in order to preserve it. The film is more ambiguous than the book and, so to speak, lacks its fire; Truffaut seems not altogether to accept Bradbury's moral simplicity. This is particularly evident at the end, with the book people murmuring aloud the words they are committing to memory, while plodding about the snow-covered landscape like zombies. The words may be saved but literature itself seems dead. The film is well photographed by Nicolas Roeg, later the celebrated director of, among others, The MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976). [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; COMMUNICATIONS. FAIL SAFE Film (1964). Max E. Youngstein-Sidney Lumet. Dir Sidney Lumet, starring Henry Fonda, Dan O'Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton, Fritz Weaver. Screenplay Walter Bernstein, based on Fail-Safe (1962) by Eugene L. BURDICK and Harvey WHEELER. 111 mins. Colour.A mistaken US nuclear attack on Moscow nearly initiates WWIII, a quandary resolved only by the US President's decision to bomb New York as an apologetic gesture. FS had the misfortune to be released soon after DR STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963), and the public preferred the vigorous black farce of Stanley KUBRICK's film to the wordy, low-key documentary style of Lumet's. The unlikely premise is lent conviction by some good performances, but this "message" film is at once too diagrammatic and too like soap opera in such simplistic portrayals as Hawkish Professor, Liberal President and Conscience-Stricken Air-Force General. [PN] FAIRBAIRNS, ZOE (ANN) (1948- ) UK writer and FEMINIST whose one sf novel, Benefits (1979), presents a DYSTOPIAN vision of the fate of women in the 21st century, as advances in reproductive technologies permit greater male control, in fear and loathing, over the female half of the race. [JC]See also: WOMEN SF WRITERS. FAIRMAN, PAUL W. (1916-1977) US editor and writer in several genres, including crime stories and erotica. His first published sf story was "No Teeth for the Tiger" for AMZ in 1950, and for some years thereafter he was a regular contributor to the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines under his own name, the pseudonyms Robert Lee and Mallory Storm, and various house pseudonyms, including E.K. JARVIS, Clee GARSON and Paul LOHRMAN; he also published books as by F.W.Paul (see below). He was the first editor of IF, Mar-Nov 1952, but departed after 4 issues to join the Ziff-Davis staff. He left Ziff-Davis in 1954 but returned in Dec 1955 and became editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC from May 1956, a position he held until Sep 1958. He launched the short-lived DREAM WORLD in 1957. He was the principal user of the Ivar JORGENSEN pseudonym, publishing under that name Ten from Infinity (1963; vt The Deadly Sky 1970; vt Ten Deadly Men 1975), Rest in Agony (1963; vt rev 1967 as PWF;The Diabolist 1973 as PWF) and Whom the Gods Would Slay (1951 Fantastic Adventures; 1968). Two of his magazine stories were filmed: "Deadly City" (1953 If as Jorgensen) as TARGET EARTH! (1954) and "The Cosmic Frame" (1953 AMZ) as Invasion of the Saucer Men (1955; vt Invasion of the Hell Creatures). Several of his books were novelizations of tv scripts, including The World Grabbers * (1964), based on an episode from One Step Beyond, and City under the Sea * (1965), based on the film City under the Sea (1965; vt War Gods of the Deep). Other books issued under his own name were the sf novel I, the Machine (1968) and the horror-story collection The Doomsday Exhibit (coll 1971). He wrote one pseudonymous novel in collaboration with Milton LESSER, The Golden Ape (1957 AMZ as "Quest of the Golden Ape" as by Adam CHASE and Ivar Jorgensen; 1959 as by Chase).PWF wrote several juvenile novels based on outlines by Lester DEL REY and published under del Rey's byline, including The Runaway Robot (1965), Tunnel through Time (1966), Siege Perilous (1966; vt The Man without a Planet 1969) and Prisoners of Space (1968). Rocket from Infinity (1966), The Infinite Worlds of Maybe (1966) and The Scheme of Things (1966) may also have been by PWF but have not been acknowledged as such. He wrote one juvenile, The Forgetful Robot (1968), under his own name. [BS]Other works: A Study in Terror * (1966; vt Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper 1967 UK) as by Ellery Queen; The Frankenstein Wheel (1972); The Girl With Something Extra* (1973), a tv tie.As by F.W.Paul: novels in the Man from S.T.U.D. sequence: The Orgy at Madame Dracula's (1968) (#2), Sock it to me, Zombie! (1968) (#3), Rape is a No-No (1969) (#6), The Planned Planethood Caper (1969) (#7) and The Lay of the Land (1969) (#8), with #s 2,3 and 8 assembled as The Man from S.T.U.D. vs the Mafia (omni 1972).See also: UNDER THE SEA. FALCONER, KENNETH [s] C.M. KORNBLUTH. FALCONER, LEE N. Julian MAY. FALCONER, SOVEREIGN Craig STRETE. FALDBAKKEN, KNUT [r] SCANDINAVIA. FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES US PULP MAGAZINE which published 81 issues, Sep/Oct 1939 (vol 1 #1)-June 1953 (vol 14 #4). It was originally part of the Frank A. MUNSEY chain but was sold to Popular Publications, which published it from Mar 1943. Mary GNAEDINGER was editor throughout.Although it published a few original stories, FFM was basically a reprint magazine - perhaps the most distinguished; it was originally founded to reprint science fantasy from the Munsey pulps. After the sale to Popular it switched to the reprinting of novels and stories not previously published in magazines. The first few monthly issues used much short material, with novels serialized, but, after going bimonthly in Aug 1940, FFM presented a complete novel in every issue. The early issues featured novels by such Munsey regulars as Ray CUMMINGS, George Allan ENGLAND, A. MERRITT and Francis STEVENS. Novels reprinted from original hardback editions included several by H. Rider HAGGARD, William Hope HODGSON, John TAINE, E. Charles VIVIAN, H.G. WELLS and S. Fowler WRIGHT. Through offering access to such material FFM allowed many pulp-sf fans to broaden their acquaintance with non-pulp material - extending even to such authors as G.K. CHESTERTON and Franz KAFKA. The quality of illustration was also exceptionally high - Virgil FINLAY did much of his best work for the magazine, including 27 covers; 26 covers were by Lawrence Sterne STEVENS. During the WWII years publication was sometimes irregular.A Canadian reprint edition ran Feb 1948-Aug 1952; this was the second Canadian reprinting of FFM, the first being the Canadian SUPER SCIENCE STORIES. [BS] FAMOUS SCIENCE FICTION US DIGEST-size magazine. 9 issues, Winter 1966 (vol 1 #1) to Spring 1969 (vol 2 #3). One of the reprint magazines ed R.A.W. LOWNDES for Health Knowledge Inc., it used material from the PULP MAGAZINES of the 1930s plus 16 original short stories by Greg BEAR, Miriam Allen DEFORD, Philip K. DICK and others. The most notable of its reprints was Lawrence MANNING's The Man who Awoke series (1933 Wonder Stories; Summer 1967-Summer 1968). To issues 2-6 Lowndes contributed a series of editorials, Standards in Science Fiction, later reprinted as Three Faces of Science Fiction (1973). [BS] FANAC US FANZINE, ed from Berkeley by Terry CARR and Ron ELLIK (1958-61) and subsequently (1961-3) by Walter Breen. Fanac was a small but frequent publication carrying information on sf writers and events and news of sf fans and their activities. Its informal and humorous style was popular and became a model for later fanzines. Contributors included well known fans and professional writers. Fanac won the HUGO for Best Fanzine in 1959. [PR] FANCHER, JANE S(UZANNE) (1952- ) US writer who began publishing genre material with two GRAPHIC NOVELS based on the work of C.J. CHERRYH: Gate of Ivrel: Claiming Rites * (graph 1987) and Gate of Ivrel: Fever Dreams * (graph 1988). In her own right JSF wrote the Cantrell sequence of SPACE OPERAS set in a Cherryhesque habitat-dominated Galaxy - Groundties (1991),Uplink (1992) and Harmonies of the 'Net (1992) - and featuring the protagonist's attempts to deal with a COMPUTER-generated crisis on a colony planet inhabited by the descendants of Native Americans. The tales are high-pitched in tone, complex and promising. JSF was credited with artwork on #13-#16 of the Elfquest comic-book series by Wendy and Richard Pini, published by Donning Starblaze; her name was removed from the credits of the revised graphic-novel version issued by Marvel Epic. [JC] FANCIFUL TALES OF TIME AND SPACE US DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue, Fall 1936, published by Shepard & Wollheim; ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. FTOTAS contained a mixture of weird, sf and fantasy stories, including work by August DERLETH, David KELLER and H. P. LOVECRAFT, as well as the first publication of Robert E. HOWARD's poem "Solomon Kane's Homecoming". FTOTAS was, strictly speaking, a SEMIPROZINE, rather like the earlier MARVEL TALES - which is to say that, despite the print run being only 200, the magazine was for sale - although it seems to have found no adequate distribution. [FHP/MJE] FANDOM The active readership of sf and fantasy, maintaining contacts through FANZINES and CONVENTIONS. Fandom originated in the late 1920s, shortly after the appearance of the first SF MAGAZINES. Readers contacted each other, formed local groups (some of which, notably the SCIENCE FICTION LEAGUE, were professionally sponsored), and soon began publication of APAS and other amateur magazines, which came to be known collectively as fanzines. The first organized convention was held in Leeds, UK, in 1937 and the first World SF Convention in New York in 1939 (although it gained its name from the holding in that year of the World's Fair in New York). From the 1920s to the 1950s, when sf was a minority interest, the number of people in fandom was small, probably no more than 500 at any one time. Since the 1960s, however, the number has steadily increased to over 10,000 - though this figure, of course, represents no more than a tiny fraction of the wider sf readership. Fandom is, like GENRE SF, primarily a US phenomenon, though other English-speaking countries quickly adopted the concept. Continental Europe, Japan and elsewhere followed much later; but increasing translation of and interest in sf has now spread fandom to some 30 countries, from Mexico to Norway. It is made up of both readers and writers of sf; many authors started as fans and many fans have written sf, so there is no absolute distinction between the two groups. Fans themselves are mainly young and male with higher education and a scientific or technical background, but exceptions are numerous and the stereotype is becoming less pronounced. Many more women entered fandom in the 1970s and 1980s.Fandom is not a normal hobbyist group. It has been suggested that, if sf ceased to exist, fandom would continue to function quite happily without it. That is an exaggeration; but it indicates the difference between sf fans and ostensibly similar groups devoted to Westerns, romances, detective fiction, etc. The reason may lie in the fact that sf is a speculative literature and consequently attractive to readers actively interested in new ideas and concepts, in addition to those idly seeking entertainment. Early fans took part in rocketry, radical politics and quasi-utopian experiments; later fans seem to find fanzines, conventions and the interaction of fandom itself a sufficient outlet for their energies and ideas. Though fandom has a tradition and history, even a FAN LANGUAGE, fans are notably independent; relatively few belong to national organizations such as N3F or the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION, and many publish individual and independent fanzines, a fact that at least one outside sociologist - Fredric Wertham (1895-1981) in The World of Fanzines (1973)-has found remarkable and even "unique".There is a fannish word "fiawol", an acronym for "fandom is a way of life": the joke is not altogether untrue. Just as sf is unrestricted in the scope of its interests, so too are fans and fandom. Fandom is thus a collection of people with a common background in sf and a common interest in communication, whether through discussion, chatter, correspondence or fanzine publishing. The result is more nearly a group of friends, or even a subculture, than a simple fan club or a literary society.There have always been divergent interest groups within fandom, and during the 1980s these tended to split more obviously. The most basic division, perhaps, is between those fans whose main love is written sf and the so-called media fans, who prefer sf in the form of CINEMA, TELEVISION or COMICS. Even among fans of written sf, fanzine fans and convention fans have become separate groups, though there is substantial overlap; comics fans have their own conventions, and there are other special-interest groups in media fandom who may be primarily interested in, for example, STAR TREK (the "Trekkies") or DR WHO; there is even a games fandom, with a particular interest in role-playing games ( GAMES AND TOYS).Various aspects of US fan history are covered in, among others, The Immortal Storm (1954) by Sam MOSKOWITZ, All our Yesterdays (1969) and A Wealth of Fable (1976 in mimeo form) by Harry WARNER Jr, The Futurians (1977) by Damon KNIGHT and The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (1978) by Frederik POHL. The fullest history of UK fandom takes the form of a fanzine, Then, written and published by Rob Hansen: the 180pp of #1, #2 and #3 (1988-91) cover the story to the end of the 1960s; more are projected. [PR/PN]See also: FAPA; FUTURIANS; OMPA; RATFANDOM. FANE, BRON R.L. FANTHORPE. FANE, JULIAN (CHARLES) (1927- ) UK writer of literary bent whose DYSTOPIA, Revolution Island (1979), was one of the last UK visions of a union-dominated left-wing future. It was published just before the incoming administration of Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) put an end, for this century, to the relevance of this sort of warning. [JC] FAN LANGUAGE Sf enthusiasts, in common with other groups, have evolved their own terminology and usage. This language comprises words and phrases used in the writing of sf itself and also the more arcane and whimsical jargon of FANDOM and FANZINES.Most sf readers are familiar with the shorthand of their literature, and words like "spaceship", "robot", "time-machine" and even "ftl drive", "spacewarp" and "ray-gun" need little or no glossing. These words, however, originated in sf and required explanation when first coined ( TERMINOLOGY). Only the growth in popularity of sf has led to the acceptance of such terms as part of everyday English. The language of fandom, however, has a more restricted use and thus is less familiar. Much of it was initially associated with fanzines, including the specialized art of duplicating them, and much of it resulted from simple contraction: "corflu", for example, was nothing stranger than correcting fluid (for stencils). It is a sign of the march of time - and of the very widespread use of COMPUTER networks in fandom-that terms like "corflu" have gained an air of ancient quaintness; another sign of the times is that contemporary fans tend to accept neologisms from the world of computing rather than to generate their own. Of more general interest are words which describe fan attitudes and behaviour. Examples are: "egoboo" (from "ego-boost"), the satisfaction gained from praise or recognition, such as seeing one's name in print; "mundane", a non-fan; "slash fiction", fan-generated stories about sexual intimacy between famed fictional characters, almost always male, the best known examples being the Kirk/Spock slash tales; and acronym- based terms like "to gafiate"(from Get Away From It All - to leave fandom; the phrase originally meant to get away from mundane reality and to enter fandom). Some of these contractions, acronyms and neologisms fill a linguistic need ("slash fiction" describes a phenomenon not otherwhere comprehended); others simply enrich the sense of affinity that fandom - like any other grouping of this sort - was partly created to foster. In general, fan argot is anything but freemasonical, and never amounts to anything like a secret code to baffle outsiders. For fans, outsiders are identifiable not so much by their failure to use certain terms as by their tendency to misuse others. The best example of this is perhaps "sf", the usual contraction used by sf fans; journalists and other nonsympathetic outsiders can readily be identified by their use of the repugnant "SCI-FI"; older fans sometimes use the contracted adjective stfnal, short for "scientifictional" ( SCIENTIFICTION).Various guides to fan language have been published (by fans) in the USA and UK. Wilson TUCKER's Neofan's Guide (1955; rev 1973; rev 1984) is a useful introduction, and Roberta Rogow's Futurespeak: A Fan's Guide to the Language of Science Fiction (1991), though erratic, covers much new ground. [PR/JC] FANTAST The FUTURIAN . FANTASTIC US DIGEST-size magazine, companion to AMAZING STORIES; published by ZIFF-DAVIS (Summer 1952-June 1965), Ultimate Publishing Co. (Sep 1965-Oct 1980); ed Howard BROWNE (Summer 1952-Aug 1956), Paul W. FAIRMAN (Oct 1956-Nov 1958), Cele GOLDSMITH (Dec 1958-June 1965; as Cele G. Lalli from July 1964), Joseph ROSS (Sep 1965-Nov 1967), Harry HARRISON (Jan-Oct 1968), Barry N. MALZBERG (Dec 1968-Apr 1969), Ted WHITE (June 1969-Jan 1979), Elinor Mavor (Apr 1979-Oct 1980; initially under the pseudonym Omar Gohagen). From Nov 1980 Fantastic was merged with AMZ. After the title was bought by Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Co. in 1965 it mainly published reprints until mid-1968; the reprint policy was finally phased out completely under White soon after he took over from Malzberg. For much of its early life F was bimonthly, but at its height - in the Goldsmith period - it went monthly, beginning with Feb 1957. The Ultimate Publishing version began in Sep 1965 as a bimonthly, but the magazine went onto a quarterly schedule in 1976. The title underwent numerous minor changes, appearing as Fantastic Science Fiction (Apr 1955-Feb 1958), Fantastic Science Fiction Stories (Sep 1959-Sep 1960), Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Oct 1960-June 1965) and Fantastic Stories at various periods. Browne originally intended F to attract a wider audience than AMZ, and published tales under bylines famous outside the sf field, including Raymond Chandler, Truman Capote, Mickey Spillane and Evelyn WAUGH (the Spillane byline was probably not authentic). After 1953, when it absorbed the much older FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, F deteriorated to become a downmarket sf magazine indistinguishable from AMZ. But from 1958, under the more adventurous editorship of Goldsmith, it improved dramatically, becoming arguably the best fantasy magazine existing. Fritz LEIBER revived his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser for an issue containing only his stories (Nov 1959), and the series remained an irregular feature. Authors whose first published stories appeared in F include Thomas M. DISCH, Ursula K. LE GUIN and Roger ZELAZNY. David BUNCH was a regular (and controversial) contributor. Following a bad period in the mid-1960s after the magazine was sold, F improved again under White, featuring a notable series of articles by Alexei and Cory PANSHIN, Science Fiction in Dimension (1970-73), publishing much early work by Gordon EKLUND and some excellent covers by Stephen FABIAN. New Conan stories by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Lin CARTER helped to boost circulation a little, but the magazine's situation remained financially precarious despite the fact that "adult fantasy" had been spectacularly revived as a paperback genre. Its deterioration after White quit was rapid and deservedly terminal.Although the words "science fiction" appeared on the cover at different times for four or five years, F was always mainly known for fantasy, being particularly strong in SWORD AND SORCERY.An undated bimonthly UK reprint ran for 8 issues, published by Strato Publications Dec 1953-Feb 1955. An anthology of stories from F is The Best from Fantastic (anth 1973) ed Ted White. [BS] FANTASTIC ADVENTURES US PULP MAGAZINE published by ZIFF-DAVIS as a companion to AMAZING STORIES. 128 issues May 1939-Mar 1953. FA began as a bimonthly, BEDSHEET-size, but maintained a monthly schedule from vol 2 #1 (Jan 1940) for most of its existence, shrinking to PULP-MAGAZINE size in June 1940. To Dec 1949 it was ed Raymond A. PALMER, and from then until May/June 1953 (when it merged with the one-year-old Ziff-Davis DIGEST magazine FANTASTIC) by Howard V. BROWNE. William L. HAMLING was managing editor Nov 1947-Feb 1951.The bulk of FA's contents were provided by a small stable of Chicago writers using a variety of house pseudonyms, although Palmer did publish several stories by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS 1939-42 and some material by established sf and fantasy writers-Robert BLOCH was a frequent contributor. The magazine was at its best under Browne's editorship in 1950-51, when it published Theodore STURGEON's first novel, The Dreaming Jewels (Feb 1950; 1950), and notable long stories by Lester DEL REY, Walter M. MILLER and William TENN. FA hardly bears comparison with its rival ASF's short-lived but excellent companion UNKNOWN, but sf writers given carte blanche to write pure fantasy for FA did often produce readable fiction with a distinctive whimsical and ironic flavour. The mass-produced material it published was of quite negligible interest.In 1941-3 and 1948-51 unsold issues were bound up in threes and sold as Fantastic Adventures Quarterly, there being 8 such in the first series, Winter 1941-Fall 1943, and 11 in the second, Summer 1948-Spring 1951. There were 2 UK editions: the first released 2 short (32pp) numbered issues in 1946, the second reprinted 24 numbered issues 1950-54, abridged from US issues dated Mar 1950-Jan 1953. [BS] FANTASTIC ADVENTURES QUARTERLY FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. FANTASTIC ADVENTURES YEARBOOK One of the many reprint DIGEST-size magazines issued by Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Co., which in 1965 had bought rights to the ZIFF-DAVIS sf magazines. Its only issue, containing stories reprinted from FANTASTIC ADVENTURES 1949-52, was released in 1970. [BS/PN] FANTASTIC JOURNEY, THE US tv series (1977). Bruce Lansbury Productions/Columbia Pictures TV/NBC. Prod Leonard Katzman. Writers included Michael Michaelian, Kathryn Michaelian Powers and the story editor, D.C. FONTANA. Dirs included Andrew V. McLaglen (pilot episode), Vincent McEveety. Starring Carl Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Jared Martin. One season, pilot episode of 75 mins plus 9 50min episodes. Colour.The pilot episode has explorers entering the Bermuda Triangle, an ocean area in which planes and ships are reputed to disappear; but, after an effectively eerie opening in which their boat is consumed by a pulsating green cloud, it becomes evident that they are still within the borders of tv-formula-land. Reaching an island that "isn't on the map", they meet a 23rd-century human, Varian (Martin), and discover that the landscape consists of segments of past and future time and space, an idea perhaps inspired by Fred HOYLE's October the First is Too Late (1966). This concept allows the protagonists to encounter a new (stereotyped) culture every week, each within walking distance. Silly and somewhat repetitive adventures take place. The series was quickly dropped. [JB/PN] FANTASTIC NOVELS US bimonthly reprint PULP MAGAZINE, companion to FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, which it somewhat resembled. 5 issues July 1940-Apr 1941, published by the Frank A. MUNSEY Corp.; it was revived by Popular Publications to publish 20 more issues Mar 1948-June 1951, with the numeration of the second series following directly on from that of the first. It was ed in both incarnations by Mary GNAEDINGER.FN used a great deal of material by A. MERRITT. #1 featured The Blind Spot (1921; 1951) by Austin HALL and Homer Eon FLINT, serialization of which had begun in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and all subsequent issues except the last featured a complete novel. Other authors whose work was reprinted included Ray CUMMINGS and George Allan ENGLAND.2 issues of a UK edition appeared in 1950 and 1951, the second (undated) issue confusingly appearing as #1. There were 17 issues of a Canadian reprint, Sep 1948-June 1951, identical to the US issues. [BS/PN] FANTASTIC PLANET La PLANETE SAUVAGE . FANTASTIC SCIENCE FICTION US BEDSHEET-size magazine, ed Walter B. GIBSON, the prolific pulp writer and creator of The Shadow. Only 2 issues appeared, #1 (Aug 1952) published by Super Science Fiction Publications, #2 (Dec 1952) by Capitol Stories, both of Connecticut.This inferior magazine, whose stories featured simplistic and chauvinistic adventure, should not be confused with FANTASTIC, also begun in 1952, which for Apr 1955-Feb 1958 was likewise titled Fantastic Science Fiction. [BS/PN] FANTASTIC SCIENCE FICTION STORIES FANTASTIC. FANTASTIC SCIENCE THRILLER UK juvenile pocketbook series published by Stanley Baker Ltd. There were 6 issues, all in 1954. [BS] FANTASTIC STORIES FANTASTIC. FANTASTIC STORIES OF IMAGINATION FANTASTIC. FANTASTIC STORY MAGAZINE FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY. FANTASTIC STORY QUARTERLY US reprint PULP MAGAZINE, 23 issues Spring 1950-Spring 1955, the title changing after #4 to Fantastic Story Magazine; published by Best Books, a subsidiary of Standard Magazines. Sam MERWIN Jr was editor until Fall 1951, being succeeded by Samuel MINES and then by Alexander SAMALMAN for the last 2 issues.Most of the reprints were from STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES; early issues carried a good deal of material from Hugo GERNSBACK's WONDER STORIES. FSQ used a few original stories, including Gordon R. DICKSON's first, "Trespass!" (1950), written with Poul ANDERSON, and occasionally went outside the chain for reprints - e.g., publishing A.E. VAN VOGT's SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946; rev 1951) in the Summer 1952 issue. Most issues carried a complete novel. There was a Canadian edition of the first 4 numbers. [BS] FANTASTIC UNIVERSE US DIGEST-size magazine, last 6 issues PULP-MAGAZINE size. 69 issues June/July 1953-Mar 1960, published by Leo MARGULIES's King-Size Publications to July 1959, then by Great American Publications. FU began as a bimonthly, but went monthly in Sep 1954 and held to that schedule for most of its life except Nov 1958-Sep 1959, when it was again bimonthly. Ed Sam MERWIN Jr June-Nov 1953; Beatrice Jones Jan-Mar 1954; Leo Margulies May 1954-Aug 1956; Hans Stefan SANTESSON Sep 1956-Mar 1960.FU's material spanned the entire fantasy spectrum; in effect it became the poor man's MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. There was no interior artwork until July 1959. Two important stories were "Who?" (1955) by Algis BUDRYS, which formed the basis of his WHO? (1958), and "Curative Telepath" (1959) by John BRUNNER, which formed the basis of his THE WHOLE MAN (1964; vt Telepathist UK). 16 of the best stories from its pages were published in The Fantastic Universe Omnibus (anth 1960) ed Santesson. [BS/PN] FANTASTIC VOYAGE Film (1966). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Richard Fleischer, starring Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmund O'Brien, Donald Pleasence. Screenplay Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Clement and J. Lewis (i.e., Jerome) BIXBY. 100 mins. Colour.A submarine and its crew of medical experts - plus a double-agent saboteur (Pleasence) - are miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of an important scientist in order to remove by laser a blood-clot from his brain. In the finale - a race to escape before they revert to full size while still inside the body-they exit via a tear duct with only seconds to spare. The special effects by L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank and Emil Kosa Jr are impressive, as are the sets-duplicating in giant size various organs of the body, such as the heart, lungs and brain - designed by art director Dale Hennesy with spectacular histological surrealism. This vivid spectacle, however, does not compensate for the ham acting, the irrelevance of Ms Welch's lingered-on breasts, and the puerile melodrama. The novelization was Fantastic Voyage * (1966) by Isaac ASIMOV. A film using a very similar theme is Joe DANTE's INNERSPACE (1987). [PN/JB]See also: GREAT AND SMALL. FANTASTIC VOYAGES The fantastic voyage is one of the oldest literary forms, and remains one of the basic frameworks for the casting of literary fantasies. Of the prose forms extant before the development of the novel in the 18th century, the fantastic voyage is the most important in the ancestry of sf ( PROTO SCIENCE FICTION). Among others, Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634), Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627), Tommaso CAMPANELLA's City of the Sun (1623) and CYRANO DE BERGERAC's Other Worlds (1657-62) all take this form, as do the oldest of all works which can be claimed as ancestors of sf: the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, from the third millennium BC, and HOMER's Odyssey, from the first.The fantastic voyage continued to dominate speculative fiction and the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE long after the rise of the novel, whose basic pretence was the painstaking imitation of experience (what the critic Ian Watt calls "formal realism"). It is partly because of this formal separation of speculative literature from the development of 19th-century social literature that there remains something of a gulf between speculative fiction and the literary MAINSTREAM today. The first sf story cast in the form of a novel was Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein (1818), but there were very few comparable works written in the succeeding century. The bulk of Jules VERNE's imaginative work falls in the category of voyages imaginaires, and many of H.G. WELLS's scientific romances adopt a similar form. Among the important fantastic voyages which today may be classified as sf are: The Man in the Moone (1638) by Francis GODWIN, Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan SWIFT, Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (1741 in Latin; exp 1745; trans as A Journey to the World Under-Ground 1742 UK) by Ludwig HOLBERG, A Short Account of a Remarkable Aerial Voyage and Discovery of a New Planet (1813) by Willem BILDERDIJK, Symzonia (1820) by Adam SEABORN, A Voyage to the Moon (1827) by Joseph ATTERLEY, Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK) and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea 1872 UK) by Jules Verne, and Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy GREG. These voyages took their heroes over the Earth's surface, into worlds underground and beneath the sea, to the Moon and to other planets. Important new scope for the fantastic voyage was revealed in the last few years of the 19th century by H.G. Wells in THE TIME MACHINE (1895), which opened up the limitless vistas of the future to planned tourism, and by Robert W. COLE in The Struggle for Empire (1900), the first major interstellar adventure story. These new imaginative territories were to prove immensely significant for 20th-century imaginative literature. The fantastic voyage has, of course, also remained central within the literature of the supernatural imagination, much of which was also ill adapted to the form of the novel. As supernatural fantasy has been influenced and infiltrated by the scientific imagination it has been the fantastic voyage, far more than any other narrative form, that has provided a suitable medium for "hybrid" works; thus a considerable number of 20th-century fantastic voyages are difficult to classify by means of the standard genre borderlines. In this no-man's-land within the territories of imaginative literature exist virtually all the works of writers such as William Hope HODGSON, Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and A. MERRITT, and various individual novels of note: Frigyes KARINTHY's Gulliverian Voyage to Faremido and Capillaria (1916 and 1922; trans omni 1966), David LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), Ruthven TODD's The Lost Traveller (1943), the title story of John Cowper POWYS's Up and Out (coll 1957), The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) by Norton Juster (1929- ) and Michel Bernanos's The Other Side of the Mountain (1967; trans 1968).When Hugo GERNSBACK first demarcated sf as a genre in the 1920s he co-opted Verne, Wells and Merritt, and also Ray CUMMINGS, author of fantastic voyages into the atomic microcosm ( GREAT AND SMALL). It was not long before E.E. "Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946) took PULP-MAGAZINE sf, at FASTER-THAN-LIGHT speeds, into the greater Universe beyond the limits of the Solar System. Other milieux were quickly introduced. Edmond HAMILTON's "Locked Worlds" (1929) adapted the notion of PARALLEL WORLDS from supernatural fantasy, and the first pulp sf voyages into a future replete with ALTERNATE WORLDS were undertaken in Jack WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME (1938; 1952). A significant refinement in the interstellar fantastic voyage, the GENERATION STARSHIP, was introduced a few years later, most significantly in Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Universe" (1941).Voyages into the "inner spaces" of the human mind had also long been commonplace in supernatural fantasy, but a sciencefictional jargon of support for such adventures was slow in arriving. Notable early examples are "Dreams are Sacred" (1948) by Peter Phillips and "The Mental Assassins" (1950) by Gregg Conrad (Rog PHILLIPS).Most of these milieux were reachable only by means of literary devices whose practicability was highly dubious if not flatly impossible. Space travel was the one hypothetical variant of the fantastic voyage into which it was possible to introduce rigorous attempts at realism ( SPACESHIPS), although the technologies involved have inevitably became dated with the passage of time. Notable attempts from various periods include Verne's De la terre a la lune (1865) and Autour de la lune (1870), Konstantin TSIOLKOVSKY's Beyond the Planet Earth (1920 Russia; trans 1960), Laurence MANNING's "Voyage of the Asteroid" (1932) and Arthur C. CLARKE's Prelude to Space (1951). The purely facilitative character of devices like TIME MACHINES and interdimensional portals should not, however, be deemed to disqualify them as means to be deployed in serious speculative fictions; indeed, they are vitally necessary.The opening up of these vast imaginary territories gave sf writers limitless scope for invention. There is no speculation - whether physical, biological, social or metaphysical - that cannot somehow be made incarnate and given a space of its own within the conventions of sf. Voyages into fluid worlds where anything and everything may happen - where the characters become helpless victims of chaos or godlike creators - may be envisaged, as in M.K. JOSEPH's The Hole in the Zero (1967), as may voyages into mathematical abstraction like "The Mathenauts" (1964) by Norman KAGAN. Sf has drawn up a framework of conventions and a vocabulary of literary devices which not only makes such adventures conceivable but renders them relatively comfortable. It is a potential that sf writers have, for various reasons, been greatly inhibited from exploiting to the full, but they have - whatever their failings-established significant signposts within all these hypothetical realms.At its simplest the fantastic voyage is a set of episodes whose function is simply to present a series of dramatic encounters, but it is rare to find the form used with no higher ambition than to offer a pleasant distraction. Many voyages which pretend to be doing that - like Lewis CARROLL's Alice books - actually present worlds whose bizarre aspects reflect the real world ironically and subversively. The same is true even of many relatively crude pulp sf stories like Francis STEVENS's The Heads of Cerberus (1919; 1952), Garret SMITH's Between Worlds (1919; 1929), John TAINE's The Time Stream (1931; 1946) and Stanton A. COBLENTZ's Hidden World (1935 as "In Caverns Below"; 1957), and in such unconvincing films as VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) and FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966). In very many cases the fantastic voyage has allegorical implications, which are most obvious when the voyage is also a quest, as it very often is in modern genre fantasy, which tends to follow the paradigm of J.R.R. TOLKIEN's The Lord of the Rings (3 vols 1954-5). The quest may be for a person, an object or a place, but the movement through a hypothetical landscape is usually paralleled by a growth towards some kind of maturity or acceptance in the protagonist's mind. The growth is towards self-knowledge or CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH in the psychologically oriented variants which lie within or close to the borders of sf; examples include Rasselas (1759) by Samuel JOHNSON, Non-Stop (1958; vt Starship US) by Brian W. ALDISS, The Drowned World (1962) by J.G. BALLARD and INVERTED WORLD (1974) by Christopher PRIEST. In stories of this kind the relationship between the environment of the story and the inner space of the protagonists's psyche is often complex and subtle; in the work of Philip K. DICK, from Eye in the Sky (1957) to A SCANNER DARKLY (1977), characters are continually forced to undertake nightmarish journeys into milieux where the distinction between real and unreal is hopelessly blurred and their personal inadequacies are painfully exposed.Any list of notable fantastic voyages in modern sf is necessarily highly selective, but some of the most important and interesting which have appeared since 1926 are as follows: The World Below (1929) by S. Fowler WRIGHT, OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) by C.S. LEWIS, The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-50; fixup 1950) by A.E. VAN VOGT, Big Planet (1952; 1957) by Jack VANCE, "Surface Tension" (1952) by James BLISH, MISSION OF GRAVITY (1954) by Hal CLEMENT, The City and the Stars (1956) by Arthur C. CLARKE, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967) and NOVA (1968) by Samuel R. DELANY, Picnic on Paradise (1968) by Joanna RUSS, Space Chantey (1968) by R.A. LAFFERTY, Tau Zero (1970) by Poul ANDERSON, Downward to the Earth (1970) and Son of Man (1971) by Robert SILVERBERG, RINGWORLD (1970) by Larry NIVEN, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972; vt War of Dreams) by Angela CARTER, Hiero's Journey (1973) by Sterling E. LANIER, Orbitsville (1975) by Bob SHAW, GALAXIES (1975) by Barry N. MALZBERG, ENGINE SUMMER (1979) by John CROWLEY, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) by Douglas ADAMS, The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) by Gene WOLFE, The Void Captain's Tale (1983) and Child of Fortune (1985) by Norman SPINRAD, The Travails of Jane Saint (1986) by Josephine SAXTON and HYPERION (1989) by Dan SIMMONS. [BS] FANTASY There is no DEFINITION OF SF that excludes fantasy, other than prescriptive definitions so narrow that, were they applied, this encyclopedia would be reduced to 10 per cent of its present length. We are talking about problems of definition raised by not a minority but a majority of all genre writings. Among the GENRE-SF writers at least some of whose work would be excluded are Terry BISSON, Ray BRADBURY, Orson Scott CARD, John CROWLEY, Avram DAVIDSON, Samuel R. DELANY, Thomas M. DISCH, Harlan ELLISON, Philip Jose FARMER, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Fritz LEIBER, Michael MOORCOCK, Andre NORTON, Tim POWERS, Keith ROBERTS, Geoff RYMAN, Lucius SHEPARD, Dan SIMMONS, Jack VANCE, John VARLEY, Gene WOLFE and Roger ZELAZNY - many of the ablest and most popular writers in the sf field. Most or all of these writers (and several hundred more names could easily be added) have written occasional works that would be accepted by almost all readers as fantasy, but that is not the point; rather it is that any definition of sf that insists upon limiting true sf to scientific or "cognitive" modes of thought, and extrapolation from known realities, would exclude the whole body of their work. It is not that Delany or Le Guin are unscientific; indeed, they are not. But the science is not the whole story; their work is deeply imbued with fantasy motifs, fantastic modes of thought, narrative connections deriving from the logic of myth, metaphors from magical or religious belief, narrative resonances evoking a backward corridor of time long preceding the ages of science and technology. Certainly most of us can and do accept nearly all the above as true sf writers, but that is because most of us are not wedded to prescriptive definitions of sf. In the real world, we recognize that both sf and fantasy, if genres at all, are impure genres. They are not homogeneous. Their fruit may be sf but the roots are fantasy, and the flowers and leaves, perhaps, something else again.It is, of course, quite simple to erect a theoretical system that distinguishes the genres, though in practice it is not especially helpful, for the reasons given above. The usual way is to regard fantasy as a subset of fiction, a circle within a circle. (The bit between inner and outer circles is mimetic fiction, which cleaves to known reality. Mimetic or "realistic" fiction is itself fairly recent; the distinctions being made here could not have been made before the 18th century.) Within the inner circle of fantasy - the fiction of the presently unreal - is a smaller circle still, a subset of a subset, and this is sf. It shares with fantasy the idea of a novum: some new element, something that distinguishes the fiction from reality as presently constituted. A novum could be a vampire or a colonized planet. The sub-subset that is sf insists that the novum be explicable in terms that adhere to conventionally formulated natural law; the remainder, fantasy, has no such requirement.To cut the definition to an irreducible minimum: mimetic fiction is real, fantasy is unreal (but FABULATION); sf is unreal but natural, as opposed to the remainder of fantasy, which is unreal and supernatural. (Or, simpler still, sf could happen, fantasy couldn't.)Several things follow from this sort of argument. The first is that all sf is fantasy, but not all fantasy is sf. The second is that, because natural law is something we come to understand only gradually, over centuries, and which we continue to rewrite, the sf of one period regularly becomes the fantasy of the next. What we regard as natural or possible depends upon the consensus reality of a given culture; but the idea of consensus reality itself is an ideal, not an absolute: in practice there are as many realities as there are human consciousnesses. A reader who believes in astrology will allow certain fictions to be sf that an astronomer would exclude. Although the point is seldom made, it could be said that the particular consensus reality to which sf aspires is that of the scientific community.In this encyclopedia we do not use the word "fantasy" in the sense suggested in the previous three paragraphs: that is, as a supergenre which includes sf. This is because we have practical problems to contend with: the hardest part in determining which authors should and should not be given entries in this encyclopedia was deciding which fantasy authors were sufficiently sf-like to be included (see Introduction for further discussion). To make any sort of distinction at all, we had to regard "fantasy" as the contents of the middle circle excluding the sf circle, in which the novum is supernatural; in other words, "fantasy", as we use the word throughout this book, is fiction about the impossible. Even then, the distinction is quite extraordinarily difficult; again and again the sf fruit has roots of fantasy; even HARD SF regularly uses fantastic or IMAGINARY SCIENCE.Although academics, especially those specializing in genre studies, have written many volumes attempting to make the sort of distinction we speak of, the sf community has been decidedly pragmatic and has generally ducked the issue. To take two major AWARDS, the HUGO and the NEBULA, and one less known, the PHILIP K. DICK AWARD, it is sometimes not realized that there is nothing in their constitutions to prevent them being given to works of fantasy rather than sf; indeed, they often are. Hugo-winners include Fritz Leiber's "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970) and Robert BLOCH's "That Hell-Bound Train" (1958); Nebula-winners include Pat MURPHY's The Falling Woman (1986) and Ursula K. Le Guin's Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990); Philip K. Dick award-winners include Tim Powers' THE ANUBIS GATES (1983) and Patricia Geary's Strange Toys (1987). There are many more such.Or take the genre magazines, and consider how many have titles deliberately including both genres: FANTASTIC SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION , SCIENCE FANTASY, and a number of others. Or consider that the genre newspaper LOCUS, along with the annual bibliographies it publishes, gives full coverage to sf, fantasy and horror and makes no clear distinction between them. Consider that the most recent academic journal about sf deliberately titles itself to include fantasy also: JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS. (We do not wish to start any hares about whatever differences may be discernible between Fantasy and the Fantastic.) Or consider the Italian word for sf, "fantascienza", which combines the two genres in the word itself; the Russian word is "fantastika". Indeed, consider that the general thrust of the European (though not UK) literary tradition is to regard fantasy and sf as two aspects of the same phenomenon; it is notable that several European authors of such entries in this encyclopedia as ROMANIA are more inclusive about what constitutes sf than this encyclopedia is as a whole. (European theoretical critics, however, can be very exclusive in their definitions; Tzvetan TODOROV muddied the waters in Introduction a la litterature fantastique [1970; trans as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 1973], which sees the fantastic, not very helpfully, as occupying the area where the reader hesitates between imputing a rational or a supernatural explanation to the events described, which would exclude most fantasy from "the fantastic"; and another celebrated European critic, Darko SUVIN, has claimed that the commercial linking of sf and fantasy, whether in marketing or in critical terms, is "a rampantly pathological phenomenon". Suvin is the best known of those critics who have offered the kind of prescriptive definition of sf noted above.)In the face of this widespread conspiracy to ignore generic boundaries wherever possible (a conspiracy to which most bookshops belong) it may seem quixotic to attempt distinctions at all. Yet we feel that a book calling itself The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction must make at least some attempt to prevent "sf proper" from being wholly swamped by the necessarily much larger number of entries (especially author entries) that a wholly inclusive policy about fantasy would entail.The task is not impossible, though necessarily subjective. The most important thing perhaps - difficult to pin down because it involves style as well as content - is to regard fantasy as sf-like when it adopts a cognitive approach to its subject matter, even if that subject matter is MAGIC. Although both are given entries in this book, most people would agree that Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books are more sciencefictional in tone - even though set in worlds where magic works and where dragons exist - than, say, H.P. LOVECRAFT's stories of the Cthulhu Mythos, though the latter are in fact explicable in sf terms where the former are not; that is, Lovecraft's Elder Gods, spawned in space or in other worlds, can be seen as enormously powerful ALIEN invaders. In practice, though, Lovecraft's readers seldom give his work an sf reading of this sort, because his tone is fundamentally and unmistakably GOTHIC and anti-rational: Le Guin is an explainer, Lovecraft prefers the weird, the sinister and the inexplicable. In other words, supernatural fantasy approaches the condition of science fiction when its narrative voice implies a post-scientific consciousness. Conversely, sf (like, for example, much of that by Andre Norton or, in a different way, by Ray Bradbury) approaches the condition of fantasy when its narrative voice implies a mystical or even anti-scientific consciousness.Authors who use fantasy elements in sf regularly rationalize their fundamentally GOTHIC motifs, Anne MCCAFFREY's dragons being an excellent example: many further examples are given in the entries on GODS AND DEMONS, GOLEM, MAGIC, MONSTERS, MYTHOLOGY and SUPERNATURAL CREATURES, these all being areas where sf and fantasy commonly collide. Conversely, when writers of HARD SF like Robert A. HEINLEIN, Poul ANDERSON and Larry NIVEN write fantasy, as they often have done, it is amusing to note how the old habits persist; they regard the marvellous and the magical with a rationalist scrutiny, treating MAGIC (which see) rather as Le Guin does, as if it were a science. The distinction between magic and science is not wholly clear at the best of times; Arthur C. CLARKE has commented that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Larry Niven and David " GERROLD's The Flying Sorcerers (1971) is constructed around this precept.A story parodying the transmutation of fantasy into sf by use of scientific jargon is Isaac ASIMOV's "Pate de Foie Gras" (1956), an sf version of "The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs". When the rationalization of fantasy elements is merely cursory (substituting, say, an ALTERNATE WORLD reached through a Dimensional Gate for something resembling what Alice found down the rabbit burrow) we would be inclined to call the result fantasy still, though others would call it sf. This kind of fiction perhaps began with Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Barsoom books in the early decades of this century, in which an unexplained superscience tends to stand in for magic. A convenient term for these stories is SCIENCE FANTASY, and they are discussed under that rubric; many "science fantasy" stories are also PLANETARY ROMANCES (which see).One reason why so much fantasy rather resembles sf is its use of many sciencefictional motifs (though it has to be said that the range of motifs is much narrower than that found in sf proper, since not much fantasy contains anything other than occult technology; there are few ROBOTS and CYBORGS and SPACESHIPS). Theme entries in this book representing the most notable sf and borderline-sf motifs of this sort are ALTERNATE WORLDS, ATLANTIS, DIMENSIONS, ESP, FANTASTIC VOYAGES, IMMORTALITY, PSI POWERS, REINCARNATION, SUSPENDED ANIMATION and TIME TRAVEL. All of these are commonplace in fantasy, most of them commonplace in sf also. Indeed, sf set in worlds where psi powers work can often be read as it if were fantasy; such, towards the sf end of the spectrum, are Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Darkover novels and, towards the fantasy end, Christopher STASHEFF's The Warlock in Spite of Himself (1969) and its sequels. A sophisticated variant is The Deep (1975) by John CROWLEY, which adroitly plays upon the generic expectations of the reader in such a way that what appears to be HEROIC FANTASY comes to seem, retrospectively, pure sf.Fantasy itself is not homogeneous; various terms are used, often not very precisely, to characterize its various kinds. An interesting distinction, made by Marshall B. TYMN, Kenneth J. Zahorski and Robert H. Boyer in the introduction to Fantasy Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide (1979), is between high fantasy, set in a fully realized secondary world, and low fantasy, which features supernatural intrusions into our own world. Most HORROR fiction takes the latter form; most SWORD AND SORCERY (or HEROIC FANTASY) takes the former. Although this encyclopedia contains many examples of both high and low fantasy, it is probably high fantasy (in this definition) that is the closest to sf: high fantasy and sf typically create imaginary worlds (alternate to our own). Thus Frank HERBERT's DUNE (1965) and J.R.R. TOLKIEN's The Lord of the Rings (1954-5), though the one is sf and the other high fantasy, have in the imaginative intensity of their detailed world-creation a great deal in common (but PLANETARY ROMANCE for an argument that the two styles of fiction differ essentially in that one is set on a planet, the other in a landscape). The kind of fantasy which creates such detailed, self-consistent alternate worlds, whatever we call it, is certainly the kind most written by sf writers "on vacation". Such is Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953; exp 1961) and Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH (coll 1950). Such worlds were never peculiar to sf writers, however. Further back, many of the works of Lord DUNSANY are effectively set in a coherent, alternate universe, as are those of E.R. EDDISON and James Branch CABELL, all three being quite unconnected to genre sf when they wrote, though all three have since had repercussions in sf that go beyond the merely stylistic. An even more notable work of fantasy is the Gormenghast sequence (1946-59) by Mervyn PEAKE; this may not be set in a fully fledged alternate world, but it does contain all the conceptual creativity that another writer might have lavished on an entire planet focused upon one emblematic building and its occupants.In its marketing, sword-and-sorcery fiction was for some time sold very much as if it were a form of sf - perhaps in part because many of the same writers have been involved in both genres, like L. Sprague DE CAMP, C.L. MOORE, Henry KUTTNER, Leigh BRACKETT, Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber; the term "sword and sorcery" is said to have been coined by Leiber. The archetypal sword-and-sorcery writer at the pulp end of the spectrum was Robert E. HOWARD in his Conan series of the 1930s, mostly in Weird Tales (1932-6); while not sf, these stories were set in a coherent and quite carefully imagined world (presented as an enormously archaic version of our own). Sword and sorcery (the term is often used in a derogatory manner, which partly explains its gradual displacement by the term HEROIC FANTASY) is generally a form of high fantasy.The overlap of supernatural-horror fiction with sf is rather smaller than the overlap of high fantasy with sf, though still very substantial indeed; this area of overlap is discussed under the rubrics GOTHIC SF and HORROR IN SF.In children's fiction ( CHILDREN'S SF) the interweaving of sf with fantasy motifs is intrinsic and can seldom be untwined, as is especially obvious in UK and Australian work, such as that of Alan GARNER, Diana Wynne JONES, Victor KELLEHER, William MAYNE and Robert WESTALL.So far we have stressed the ways in which sf and fantasy get mixed up together. In fact the position of the genre analyst is by no means hopeless, for distinctions between high fantasy (or even fantasy generally) and sf are quite real, however elusive, and they extend very much further than fantasy-equals-impossible versus sf-equals-possible. Such distinctions always work better, of course, at the ends of the spectrum rather than at its centre, where apparent opposites become merged (or balanced) together. At the extreme fantasy end of the spectrum the imaginary worlds tend, strongly, to be conceptually static; history is cyclical; the narrative form is almost always the quest for an emblematic object or person; the characters are emblematic too, most commonly of a dualistic (even Manichean) system where good confronts evil; most fundamentally of all, the protagonists are trapped in pattern. They live in a determinist world, they fulfil destiny, they move through the steps of an ancient dance. At the extreme sf end of the spectrum the stories are set in kinetic venues that register the existence of change, history is evolutionary and free will operates in a possibly arbitrary universe whose patterns, if they exist at all, may be only those imposed upon it (or, according to some quantum theorists, created in it) by its human observers. If there is truth in this argument, then it follows that the important distinction between fantasy and sf is more philosophical than technological, a matter of METAPHYSICS.There is one final group of fantasists, the fabulators ( FABULATION), who create fantastic changes (often quite minor) in everyday reality, often ironically or for purposes of SATIRE, rather than for the creation of frissons of horror or romantic adventure. Such a work is Franz KAFKA's Die Verwandlung (1916; trans as The Metamorphosis 1937), in which a man is turned into a beetle. Many such works stem from traditions of fable and ABSURDIST literature, sometimes taking the form of MAGIC REALISM. John BARTH, Angela CARTER, Richard CONDON and Thomas PYNCHON are only four of the several hundred such writers who receive entries in this encyclopedia, including some whose associations with genre sf have been rather closer, like Barry N. MALZBERG, Kurt VONNEGUT Jr, and Robert SHEA and Robert Anton WILSON, whose Illuminatus trilogy (1975) puts a range of fantasy and sf devices to absurdist ends in a black comedy proposing PARANOIA as the most fully appropriate response to modern life.In the 1970s fantasy (and its variant labels like Epic Fantasy, Heroic Fantasy and so forth) became an important area of book marketing. Some alarmist observers believed that the density of fantasy publication was such that sf as a viable, separate marketing category was doomed. In fact, sf has proved able to weather the storm, but fantasy publishing continues strongly into the 1990s, only slightly abated, especially in the area of trilogies and series whose points of reference (sometimes approaching plagiarism) continue in the main to be Robert E. Howard and, especially, J.R.R. Tolkien. One effect of fantasy's publishing success (and to a lesser degree that of horror) may have been to make genre-crossing, which was always common, even more popular. K.W. JETER and George R.R. MARTIN move from sf to horror; Terry PRATCHETT, Michael Scott ROHAN, Robert HOLDSTOCK and others from sf to fantasy; Stephen KING, contrariwise, moves sometimes from horror to sf; James P. BLAYLOCK contrives, dizzyingly, to occupy all such worlds simultaneously, as do John Crowley and arguably Gene Wolfe; fantasy writers like John M. FORD or Barbara HAMBLY or David GEMMELL invent sf-like worlds; supposedly hard-sf writer Orson Scott Card is repeatedly drawn to PASTORAL fantasy; William GIBSON, Elizabeth HAND, even Greg BEAR, put GODS AND DEMONS into CYBERPUNK worlds; R.A. MACAVOY, Patricia MCKILLIP and Sheri S. TEPPER turn from high fantasy to sf; Brian M. STABLEFORD turns to SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES about vampires and werewolves. In the face of this insouciance on the part of the makers of sf and fantasy, the wise critic will eschew rigid prescription. Beyond the very various distinctions already suggested, no consistent demarcation-line between sf and fantasy should be extractable from a reading of this encyclopedia. Certainly none was intended. [PN] FANTASY Title used on two early UK sf magazines. The first was a PULP magazine published by George Newnes Ltd., ed T. Stanhope Sprigg. It produced 3 issues 1938-9. The second, subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction", was a saddle-stapled DIGEST issued by the Temple Bar Publishing Co., ed Walter GILLINGS. It too lasted 3 issues, Dec 1946 and Apr and Aug 1947. Eric Frank RUSSELL and John Russell FEARN were featured in both series, and the second magazine featured 3 early stories by Arthur C. CLARKE (2 pseudonymous, as by E.G. O'Brien and Charles Willis). The second magazine was killed by paper restrictions, but Gillings was able to use some of his backlog of stories when he became the first editor of SCIENCE FANTASY in 1950. [BS/PN] FANTASY AMATEUR PRESS ASSOCIATION FAPA. FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION The often-used short form of the title of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION , often referred to, in this encyclopedia and elsewhere, as FSF. [PN] FANTASY BOOK 1. Magazine, BEDSHEET-format for 2 issues, then various DIGEST-size formats. 8 issues July 1947-Jan 1951; irregular. Published by FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC.; ed Garrett Ford (pseudonym of William L. CRAWFORD). FB was generally an undistinguished and erratic magazine. Some issues appeared in three different editions with different covers. FB is best remembered for publishing in #1 The People of the Crater", the first sf story by Andre " NORTON (as Andrew North) and, in #6 (Jan 1950), Paul Linebarger's first story as Cordwainer SMITH, "Scanners Live in Vain". When it ceased publication it left incomplete a Murray LEINSTER serial, "Journey to Barkut"; this later appeared in full in STARTLING STORIES (Jan 1952), and in book form as Gateway to Elsewhere (1954).2. US SEMIPROZINE, BEDSHEET-format. 23 issues Oct 1981-Mar 1987, ed Dennis Mallonee and Nick Smith from California, bimonthly, then quarterly from #4. Unlike the first FB, to which it was unconnected, this published almost no sf, concentrating on fantasy and horror. Its authors included R.A. L AFFERTY, Alan Dean FOSTER and Ian WATSON. Circulation seldom rose above 3000. [MJE/PN] FANTASY COMMENTATOR US FANZINE (1943-current), ed from New York by A. Langley SEARLES The Winter 1993-94 issue, no 45/46, was called "50th Anniversary Double Issue". The original run of 26 issues, 1943-53 - quarterly before 1950 and then irregular - featured well written, scholarly articles about contemporary fantasy writers and an impressive series of bibliographies. FC was notable at this time for publishing the series of articles about FANDOM by Sam MOSKOWITZ that later became The Immortal Storm (1954) and for the original material it carried by A. MERRITT, Henry KUTTNER, David H. KELLER, H.P. LOVECRAFT and William Hope HODGSON. FC was suspended in 1953 but revived in 1978 with #29 (facsimiles of #27-#28, which had been set up in 1953 but not published, were released in 1986). Up to 1950 FC appeared quarterly, thereafter irregularly. Its current incarnation was annual to 1990, semiannual thereafter. Regular contributors to the current version include Moskowitz and Mike ASHLEY. FC remains strong in scholarship about early sf and fantasy. [RH] FANTASY FICTION/FANTASY STORIES US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, May and Nov 1950, published by Magabook, ed Curtis Mitchell. "Old and New Fantasy Stories but Always the Best" was the slogan of this shortlived magazine, whose stories were largely reprinted from general PULP MAGAZINES of the 1930s and early 1940s. It also offered prizes for reports of true fantastic experiences and of haunted houses. #2 was retitled Fantasy Stories, carried a lengthy UFO feature ("Flying Saucer Secrets Blabbed by Mad Pilot", as the cover put it), and was three months late. #3 never materialized.The final 3 issues of the 1950s FANTASY MAGAZINE, an unconnected publication, were also titled Fantasy Fiction. [MJE] FANTASY HOUSE VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION. FANTASY MAGAZINE/FANTASY FICTION 1. US DIGEST-size magazine. 4 issues, Feb, June, Aug, Nov 1953, all but #1 under the latter title, published by Future Publications, New York, ed Lester DEL REY, under his own name for #1-#3 and under the house name Cameron Hall for #4. All issues had covers by Hannes BOK. #1 featured a Conan novelette revised by L. Sprague DE CAMP from Robert E. HOWARD's unpublished "The Black Stranger". The contents, of quite good quality, were almost exclusively fantasy, much of it rather in the style of UNKNOWN.2. Fantasy Magazine was a vt 1934-7 of a celebrated FANZINE, Science Fiction Digest, founded 1932, of which Julius SCHWARTZ was one of the editors. This in turn had incorporated The Time Traveller, often regarded as the first true fanzine (#1, Jan 1932), which Schwartz had published with Mort WEISINGER. FM published original fiction, factual articles, reviews, gossip and biographical pieces. [BS/PN] FANTASY NEWSLETTER FANTASY REVIEW. FANTASY PRESS An early US SMALL PRESS specializing in sf/fantasy, historically important in the growth of genre-sf PUBLISHING before sf was discovered by mass-market book houses. It was founded by Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH in 1946, based in Reading, Pennsylvania. It published a number of works in hardcover by such authors as John W. CAMPBELL Jr, L. Sprague DE CAMP, E.E. "Doc" SMITH, Stanley G. WEINBAUM and Jack WILLIAMSON. It folded in 1958 at a time when small-press publishing was in crisis. Eshbach sold the company and its stock to Donald M. Grant Publisher. [MJE/PN] FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC. US SMALL PRESS based in Los Angeles and specializing in sf/fantasy, generally known by its initials FPCI. One of the many semiprofessional publishing enterprises of William L. CRAWFORD, FPCI was one of the less notable companies to start issuing magazine sf in book form in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Its authors included L. Sprague DE CAMP, L. Ron HUBBARD, Olaf STAPLEDON, John TAINE and A.E. VAN VOGT, but only lesser works of theirs. Crawford also published the magazines FANTASY BOOK and later SPACEWAY and Witchcraft and Sorcery (formerly Coven 13) under the FPCI imprint, in addition to various occult titles and books by Emil PETAJA and others.The pre-WWII incarnation of the company, then known just as Fantasy Publishers, had brought out the magazines MARVEL TALES and UNUSUAL STORIES; and an associated company, Visionary Publishing Co., had published The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936) by H.P. LOVECRAFT. [MJE/PN] FANTASY REVIEW 1. UK FANZINE, ed Walter GILLINGS. 18 issues 1947-50. Gillings, previously editor of several UK SF MAGAZINES - TALES OF WONDER (1937-42), STRANGE TALES (1946) and FANTASY (1946-7) - found himself needing an outlet for his energies after the demise of the latter title and began FR, which was almost identical in format and content to his earlier fanzine Scientifiction (7 issues 1937-8) and later fanzine Cosmos (3 issues 1969). It carried reviews and sf news items, and was professional in appearance. For its last 3 numbers the title changed to Science-Fantasy Review. When in 1950 Gillings was given the editorship of SCIENCE FANTASY, the new sister magazine to Nova Publications' NEW WORLDS, he incorporated Science-Fantasy Review into its first 2 issues as a news-chat section; this disappeared when John CARNELL assumed the editorship of Science Fantasy with #3.2. US monthly critical SEMIPROZINE, founded as Fantasy Newsletter by Paul C. Allen in Rochester, NY, as, literally, an 8pp newsletter in June 1978, but becoming a magazine in Jan 1980, ceasing publication in Oct 1981. It was revived at once, however, by Robert Collins, director of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts at Florida Atlantic University. The magazine, which had always published interesting features, gained much strength when amalgamated at the beginning of 1984 with SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BOOK REVIEW (Neil BARRON, editor of the latter, becoming review editor) with a new title, Fantasy Review, but a continuation of the previous numeration. (The logo showed SF & Fantasy Review for several months, with the "SF" very small; it was soon dropped.) FR had the widest (though not necessarily deepest) sf-book-review coverage in the US and probably the world, covering fantasy and horror as well as sf. Later review editors were Carol McGuirk and Rob Latham. Quite handsomely produced, FR had the usual difficulty in finding a commercially viable market for a magazine of the standard desired by the editor, and folded with #103, July/Aug 1987. The review section lives on less usefully in annual form, beginning 1988, as SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL, with Collins and Latham co-editors. [PN] FANTASY STORIES FANTASY FICTION. FANTASY TIMES US FANZINE (1941-69) ed James V. Taurasi Sr (1917-1991), briefly by Sam MOSKOWITZ during WWII, Taurasi again, and Frank Prieto Jr from 1966. Published erratically until 1946, FT thereafter established itself as a straightforward sf and fantasy newsletter containing news, notes and reviews. In 1957 its title changed to Science Fiction Times, and publication continued under this title until #465, in 1969. Though its contents were mostly routine records of events, the magazine did attract some attention from publishers and authors; James BLISH was its book reviewer for a time (c1956). FT won the HUGO for Best Fanzine in 1955 and 1957. Its news-reporting function was effectively taken over by LOCUS. A short-lived Spanish edition, Tiempo de Fantasia, was published in 1949, and a successful German version, SF Times, began publication in 1958, at first as a straight translation, later - especially under the editorship of Hans Joachim ALPERS - as a serious German fanzine in its own right ( GERMANY). [PR/PN] FANTAZIA 2000 ISRAEL. FANTHORPE, R(OBERT) L(IONEL) (1935- ) UK writer who became a schoolteacher and preacher. From 1954 to 1965 RLF was an sf writer of remarkable productivity, towards the end of that period producing novels on a weekly schedule for BADGER BOOKS and associated imprints, for which he was paid ps25 a volume, dictating his tales into a battery of tape-recorders for transcription by members of his family or by friends. The rushed endings of many of his novels were a result of this practice, as he often did not know how close he was to his allotted word-length until batches of typing had been completed; if a tale had reached its length while still in mid-plot, it would be truncated forthwith. It has been claimed of RLF that he was the world's most prolific writer in the genre. His first story, written at the age of 16, was "Worlds without End" as by Lionel Roberts for FUTURISTIC SCIENCE STORIES in 1952. His first novel, Menace from Mercury (1954), was published under the house name Victor LA SALLE; other house names under which he would work were John E. MULLER and Karl ZEIGFREID. Within a few years he was responsible for the vast majority of Badger's sf and supernatural output, both novels and collections of stories, some of the former and all of the latter being included in the numbered series Supernatural Stories. (RLF's practice with stories was generally to provide all the contents of a particular issue, using several pseudonyms in addition to his own name, creating in effect a series of collections. It is as collections that these titles are listed in this entry, under the title and name story listed on the cover, though in fact this title might not actually appear within, and pseudonymous work by other authors occasionally appears in collections otherwise by RLF; we have here violated our normal practice of designating such books as anthologies.) After Badger Books folded, RLF fell silent, though he made a brief comeback as a fiction writer with The Black Lion (1979), written in collaboration with his wife, Patricia Fanthorpe (1938- ); it is a not-unsuccessful fantasy, the first of a projected (but still incomplete) trilogy.One series of some interest, published under the Bron Fane pseudonym, chronicles the adventures of the Bulldog Drummond-like Val Stearman and the immortal La Noire: "The Seance" (1958), "The Secret Room" (1958), "Valley of the Vampire" (1958), "The Silent Stranger" (1959), "The Other Line" (1959), "The Green Cloud" (1959), "Pursuit" (1959), "Jungle of Death" (1959), "The Crawling Fiend" (1960), "Curtain Up" (1960), "The Secret of the Lake" (1960), "The Loch Ness Terror" (1961), "The Deathless Wings" (1961), "The Green Sarcophagus" (1961), "Black Abyss" (1961), "Forbidden City" (1961), "The Secret of the Pyramid" (1961), "Something at the Door" (1961), "Forbidden Island" (1962), "Storm God's Fury" (1962), "Vengeance of the Poltergeist" (1962), "The Persian Cavern" (1962), "The Chasm of Time" (1962), "The Voice in the Wall" (1962), "Cry in the Night" (1962), "The Nine Green Men" (1963), "The Man who Never Smiled" (1963), "Return Ticket" (1963), "The Room that Never Was" (1963), "The Walker" (1963), Softly By Moonlight (1963), "The Thing from Sheol" (1963), "The Man who Knew" (1963), Unknown Destiny (1964), "The Warlock" (1964), The Macabre Ones (1964), "The Troll" (1964), "The Walking Shadow" (1964), "The Lake Thing" (as Pel Torro, 1964), "The Accursed" (1965), "The Prodigy" (1965), U.F.O. 517 (1965), "Girdle of Fear" (1965), "Repeat Programme" (1966) and "The Resurrected Enemy" (1966).Apart from those listed below in connection with book titles, RLF's pseudonyms included Neil Balfort, Othello Baron, Oben Lerteth, Elton T. Neef, Peter O'Flinn, Rene Rolant, Robin Tate and Deutero Spartacus. All but the last are partial anagrams of his name. [MJE]Other works:As R.L. Fanthorpe: Resurgam (coll 1957); Secret of the Snows (coll 1957); The Flight of the Valkyries (coll 1958); The Waiting World (1958); Watchers of the Forest (coll 1958); Call of the Werewolf (coll 1958); The Death Note (coll 1958); Mermaid Reef (coll 1959); Alien from the Stars (1959); Fiends (1959); Space-Borne (1959); The Ghost Rider (coll 1959); Hyperspace (1959); Doomed World (1960); The Man who Couldn't Die (coll 1960); Out of the Darkness (1960); Satellite (1960); Asteroid Man (1960); Werewolf at Large (coll 1960); Hand of Doom (1960); Whirlwind of Death (coll 1960); Flame Mass (1961); Fingers of Darkness (coll 1961); Face in the Dark (coll 1961); Devil from the Depths (coll 1961); Centurion's Vengeance (coll 1961); The Golden Chalice (1961); The Grip of Fear (coll 1961); Chariot of Apollo (coll 1962); Hell has Wings (coll 1962); Graveyard of the Damned (coll 1962); The Darker Drink (coll 1962); Curse of the Totem (coll 1962); Space Fury (1962); Goddess of the Night (coll 1963); Moon Wolf (coll 1963); Avenging Goddess (coll 1964); Death has Two Faces (coll 1964); The Shrouded Abbot (coll 1964); Bitter Reflection (coll 1965); Neuron World (1965); The Triple Man (1965); Call of the Wild (coll 1965); Vision of the Damned (coll 1965); The Sealed Sarcophagus (coll 1965); The Unconfined (1966); Stranger in the Shadow (coll 1966); Curse of the Khan (coll 1966); Watching World (1966); The Story of St Francis of Assisi (1989), nonfiction; Three of the Earliest SF Stories by Lionel Fanthorpe (coll 1991 chap); Collection of Documents Referring to Lionel Fanthorpe's Early Writings (coll 1991 chap).As Erle Barton: The Planet Seekers (1964).As Lee Barton: The Unseen (1963); The Shadow Man (1966).As Thornton Bell: Space Trap (1964); Chaos (1964).As Leo Brett: The Drud (coll 1959); The Return (coll 1959); Exit Humanity (1960); The Microscopic Ones (1960); The Faceless Planet (1960); March of the Robots (1961); Black Infinity (1961); Mind Force (1961); Nightmare (1962); Face in the Night (1962); The Immortals (1962); The Frozen Tomb (coll 1962); They Never Come Back (1963); The Forbidden (1963); From Realms Beyond (1963); Phantom Crusader (coll 1963); The Alien Ones (1963); Power Sphere (1963).As Bron Fane: The Crawling Fiend (coll 1960); Juggernaut (1960; vt Blue Juggernaut 1965 US); Last Man on Earth (1960); Rodent Mutation (1961); Storm God's Fury (coll 1962); The Intruders (1963); Somewhere Out There (1963); The Thing from Sheol (coll 1963); Nemesis (1964); Suspension (1964); The Walking Shadow (coll 1964).As L.P. Kenton: Destination Moon (1959).As Victor La Salle (house name): Victor LA SALLE.As John E. Muller (house name): A 1000 Years On (1961); The Mind Makers (1961); The Ultimate Man (1961); Forbidden Planet (1961); The Uninvited (1961); Crimson Planet (1961); The Venus Venture (1961; 1965 US as by Marston Johns); The Return of Zeus (1962); Perilous Galaxy (1962); The Eye of Karnak (1962); Infinity Machine (1962); Uranium 235 (1962); The Man who Conquered Time (1962); Orbit One (1962; 1966 US as by Mel Jay); Micro Infinity (1962); Beyond Time (1962; 1966 US as by Marston Johns); Vengeance of Siva (1962); The Day the World Died (1962); The X-Machine (1962); Reactor XK9 (1963); Special Mission (1963); Dark Continuum (1964); Mark of the Beast (1964); The Exorcists (1965); The Negative Ones (1965); The Man from Beyond (1965); Spectre of Darkness (1965); Beyond the Void (1965); Out of the Night (1965); Phenomena X (1966) and Survival Project (1966).As Phil Nobel: The Hand from Gehenna (coll 1964).As Lionel Roberts: The Incredulist (coll 1954); Guardians of the Tomb (coll 1958); The Golden Warrior (coll 1958); Dawn of the Mutants (1959); Time Echo (1959; 1964 US as by Robert Lionel); Cyclops in the Sky (1960); The In-World (1960); The Face of X (1960; 1965 US as by Robert Lionel); The Last Valkyrie (1961); The Synthetic Ones (1961); Flame Goddess (1961).As Neil Thanet: Beyond the Veil (1964); The Man who Came Back (1964).As Trebor Thorpe: The Haunted Pool (coll 1958); Five Faces of Fear (1960); Lightning World (1960); Voodoo Hell Drums (coll 1961).As Pel Torro: Frozen Planet (1960); World of the Gods (1960); The Phantom Ones (1961); Legion of the Lost (1962); The Strange Ones (1963); Galaxy 666 (1963); Formula 29X (1963; vt Beyond the Barrier of Space 1969 US); The Timeless Ones (1963); Through the Barrier (1963); The Last Astronaut (1963); The Face of Fear (1963); The Return (1964; vt Exiled in Space 1969 US); Space No Barrier (1964; vt Man of Metal 1969 US); Force 97X (1965).As Olaf Trent: Roman Twilight (coll 1963).As Karl Zeigfreid (house name): Gods of Darkness (1962); Walk through Tomorrow (1963); Android (1962); Atomic Nemesis (1962); Zero Minus X (1962); Escape to Infinity (1963); Radar Alert (1963); World of Tomorrow (1963; vt World of the Future 1964 US); The World that Never Was (1963); Projection Infinity (1964); No Way Back (1964); Barrier 346 (1965); The Girl from Tomorrow (1965). FANZINE A fanzine is an amateur magazine produced by sf fans. The term "fanzine", coined by Russ Chauvenet in 1941, has been borrowed and used by comics collectors, wargamers, "underground" publishers and other non-sf enthusiasts. The fastest-growing category in the mid-1980s was the soccer fanzine.The first known fanzine was The Comet (May 1930) ed Raymond A. PALMER for the Science Correspondence Club, followed by The Planet (July 1930) ed Allen Glasser for the New York Scienceers. However, both of these were mainly about science, although the second did include reviews of the professional sf magazines. Some regard the first true fanzine-certainly the first major one - as The Time Traveller (#1, Jan 1932) ed Julius SCHWARTZ and Mort WEISINGER. Schwartz, with others, went on to publish Science Fiction Digest ( FANTASY MAGAZINE). These and other early fanzines were straightforward publications dealing exclusively with sf or amateur science, and were produced by local fan groups founded in the USA by the more active readers of contemporary professional SF MAGAZINES. However, as interest grew and sf fans formed closer contacts and friendships, individual fans began publishing for their own amusement, so that fanzines became more diverse and their contents more capricious; fan editors also began to exchange fanzines and to send out free copies to contributors and letter-writers. Thus fanzines abandoned any professional aspirations in exchange for informality and an active readership-characteristics that persist to the present and distinguish fanzines from conventional hobbyist publications. From the USA the idea spread to the UK, where Maurice Hanson and Dennis Jacques started NOVAE TERRAE (later ed E.J. CARNELL as the forerunner of NEW WORLDS) in 1936. Since then fanzine publishing has proliferated and many thousands of titles have appeared. Probably 500-600 fanzines are currently in production, the majority in North America but with substantial numbers from the UK, Australia and Western Europe, and occasional items from Japan, South America, South Africa, New Zealand, Turkey and Eastern Europe.Many modern sf writers started their careers in FANDOM and published their own fanzines; Ray BRADBURY, for example, produced 4 issues of Futuria Fantasia (1939-41), which contained inter alia his first published stories. Other former fanzine editors include James BLISH, Kenneth BULMER, John CHRISTOPHER, Harlan ELLISON, Damon KNIGHT, C.M. KORNBLUTH, Charles Eric MAINE, Michael MOORCOCK, Frederik POHL, Robert SILVERBERG and Ted WHITE. Some still find time to publish: Wilson TUCKER, for example, has continued to produce Le Zombie since 1938. Fan editors are of course free to produce whatever they like, and so fanzines vary dramatically in production, style and content. Normally they are duplicated, photocopied or printed, consisting of anything from a single sheet to 100+ pages, and with a circulation of from 5 to 5000 copies, though the tendency in the 1980s has been to call fanzines with a circulation of over 1000 SEMIPROZINES. The smaller fanzines are often written entirely by the editor and serve simply as letter substitutes sent out to friends; others have limited distribution within amateur press associations such as FAPA and OMPA. The larger fanzines, with an average circulation of 200-500, fall into three main categories, with considerable overlap: those dealing with sf (containing reviews, interviews, articles and discussions); those dealing with sf fans and fandom (containing esoteric humour); and those dealing with general material (containing anything from sf to Biblical engineering). (A further category consists of fanzines exclusively publishing amateur fiction; these are not listed in this volume unless widely enough circulated to be regarded as semiprozines.) On the fringe there are specialist fanzines catering for FANTASY and SWORD-AND-SORCERY fans, others devoted to cult authors such as J.R.R. TOLKIEN, H.P. LOVECRAFT and Robert E. HOWARD, and yet others which deal with sf films or tv series such as STAR TREK. Since 1955 there has been a Best Fanzine category in the HUGO Awards, and since 1984 a Best Semiprozine category also.A selection of 36 important fanzines - some now regarded as semiprozines - from different periods of fandom receive full entries in this volume: ALGOL, The ALIEN CRITIC , ANSIBLE, AUSTRALIAN SF REVIEW, AUSTRALIAN SF REVIEW: SECOND SERIES, BIZARRE, CRITICAL WAVE, FANAC, FANTASY COMMENTATOR, FANTASY MAGAZINE, FANTASY REVIEW, FANTASY TIMES, FILE 770, The FUTURIAN, HYPHEN, JANUS/AURORA, LOCUS, LUNA MONTHLY, NIEKAS, NOVAE TERRAE , PSYCHOTIC, QUANDRY, QUARBER MERKUR, RIVERSIDE QUARTERLY, SCIENCE FICTION: A REVIEW OF SPECULATIVE FICTION, SF CHRONICLE, SF COMMENTARY, SCIENCE FICTION EYE, SLANT, SPECULATION, THRUST, VECTOR, The VORTEX, WARHOON, XERO and YANDRO. Data on another dozen or so fanzine titles are available by following up cross-references. The majority of the above are critical magazines, and many are listed again under CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF. [PR/PN] FAPA The commonly used acronym for the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, formed in 1937 in the USA by Donald A. WOLLHEIM to facilitate distribution on an APA basis of FANZINES published by and for members; it was the first of many such groups. Early contributors included E.J. CARNELL, Robert A.W. LOWNDES, Sam MOSKOWITZ, Frederik POHL, Wilson TUCKER and Richard WILSON. Current members include Moskowitz, F.M. BUSBY and Robert SILVERBERG. [PR] FARCA, MARIE C. (1935- ) US writer whose first sf novel, Earth (1972), is a competent adventure. Her second, Complex Man (1973), is a sequel set on another planet. [JC] FAR FRONTIERS US "magazine" in paperback-book format; it could also be regarded as an original anthology series. Quarterly, published by Baen Books, ed Jerry POURNELLE and Jim BAEN and (uncredited) John F. CARR; 7 issues, from Far Frontiers (anth 1985) at the very beginning of that year to Far Frontiers Vol VII (anth Winter 1986). At this point Baen revived (as solo editor) his very similar Destinies series of magazines/anthologies as New Destinies with #1 in Spring 1987 ( DESTINIES), and Far Frontiers came to an end. Something of a shop-window for upcoming Baen Book publications, FF featured several book excerpts. Its emphasis was on HARD SF, sometimes militaristic, and on good science-fact articles; authors of the latter included Robert L. FORWARD, John GRIBBIN, Pournelle and G. Harry STINE. Authors of stories included Greg BEAR, David BRIN, John DALMAS, Dean ING, Vernor VINGE and Timothy ZAHN. [PN] FAR FUTURE Fred Polak's The Image of the Future (1973) identifies two distinct categories of images of the distant future, which he called the "future of prophecy" and the "future of destiny". Prophets, although they refer to the future, are primarily concerned with the present: they issue warnings about the consequences of present actions and demand that other courses of action be adopted. Their images are images of the historical future which will grow out of human action in the present day ( NEAR FUTURE). To the second category of images, however, present concerns are usually irrelevant; these are images of the ultimate future, taking the imagination as far as it can reach. Such visions are related to ESCHATOLOGY and often feature the END OF THE WORLD; others depict a world where everything has so changed as to have become virtually incomprehensible, or a world which has attained some ultimate UTOPIAN state of perfection.Scientifically inspired images of the far future could not come into being until the true age of the Earth and therefore the scope of possible change were understood - an understanding first popularized by Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in Principles of Geology (1830). Even then it was not until the establishment of the theory of EVOLUTION that writers found a conceptual tool which made it possible for them to imagine the kinds of changes which might plausibly take place. W.H. HUDSON's A Crystal Age (1887), which belongs to the utopian school, embraces an evolutionary philosophy of a curiously mystical kind, and such traces of mysticism are retained by very many representations of the far future. Most early images of the far future accepted estimates of the likely age of the Sun based on the tacit, natural but false assumption that its heat was produced by combustion; the far-future Earth is thus represented as a cold, dark and desolate place from which life is slowly disappearing. We find such imagery in H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), George C. WALLIS's "The Last Days of Earth" (1901) and William Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908). Hodgson's The Night Land (1912) is bizarre as well as bleak, offering a phantasmagorical vision of a decaying world inherited by frightful monsters. The optimistic far-future vision which concludes George Bernard SHAW's Back to Methuselah (1921) is predicated on the assumption that mind can and will cast off the confining shackles of matter. More elaborate but no less striking imagery is featured in the concluding section of Guy DENT's Emperor of the If (1926), in which our insane descendants are no longer human in form or ability but remain all too human in psychological terms. S. Fowler WRIGHT's The World Below (incorporating The Amphibians [1924]; 1929) is equally ambitious, and contrives to transcend the images of decay and desolation associated with so many other visions. These works were quickly followed by Olaf STAPLEDON's monumental attempt to track the entire evolutionary future of mankind, LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), partly based on a blueprint provided by J.B.S. HALDANE in "The Last Judgment" (1927). Other than millenarian fantasies, which claim that the future of destiny is imminent, very few novels link the two images of the future defined by Polak within a coherent historical narrative; LAST AND FIRST MEN is by far the most outstanding example, although Camille FLAMMARION's Omega (trans 1894) had earlier brought the two into rather awkward juxtaposition.The early sf PULP MAGAZINES featured several far-future visions of the end of the world, but had little to compare with the imagery of the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES. One notable story that presents the extinction of mankind's remote descendants as one more stage in a continuing process of change is "Seeds of the Dusk" (1938) by Raymond Z. GALLUN, in which a much-changed Earth is "invaded" and "conquered" by spores from another world. Gallun's "When Earth is Old" (1951) has time travellers negotiating with sentient plants to assure the rebirth of the species. The quest for some such rebirth is a common motif in far-future stories, and time travellers from the present frequently contrive to turn the evolutionary tide that is sweeping humanity towards extinction, as in such stories as John W. CAMPBELL Jr's "Twilight" (1934 as by Don A. Stuart). The idea of reigniting a senescent Sun in order to give Earth and mankind a new lease of life is poignantly deployed in Clark Ashton SMITH's "Phoenix" (1954) and extravagantly developed in Gene WOLFE's Book of the New Sun tetralogy (1980-83). Such notions arise from false analogies drawn between the life of an individual and that of a species, alleging that species may "age" and become "senescent". The popularity of such ideas in sf is not surprising, given the influence of similar analogies between individuals and cultures in the work of philosophers of history like Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). Spengler's ideas were a strong influence on James BLISH, whose most memorable accounts of the far future are "Watershed" (1957) and Midsummer Century (1972). Images of an aged world that has returned to its "second childhood" are sometimes as affectionate as rose-tinted images of human retirement; the classic example is John CROWLEY's ENGINE SUMMER (1979).Clark Ashton Smith set the most lushly exotic of all his series in Zothique, the "last continent" - a bizarre and decadent world in which magic flourishes. The stories, all written in the 1930s, were eventually collected in Zothique (coll 1970). Zothique offered Smith more imaginative freedom than his distant-past scenario Hyperborea precisely because it was irredeemably decadent. A similar but less fervent series of fantasies is Jack VANCE's THE DYING EARTH (coll 1950), whose later sequels include The Eyes of the Overworld (fixup 1966), which contains a stronger strain of picaresque comedy. A. MERRITT never used the far future as a setting, but his lavish descriptions of exotic landscapes influenced a number of far-future fantasies; Henry KUTTNER and C.L. MOORE, who wrote a series of Merritt-influenced novels in the 1940s, offered a Merrittesque far future in Earth's Last Citadel (1943; 1964).The classic pulp sf story of the far future is Arthur C. CLARKE's Stapledon-influenced Against the Fall of Night (1948; 1953; rev vt The City and the Stars 1956). Its imagery is stereotyped - a bleak, derelict Earth with cities whose handsome, incurious inhabitants are parasitic upon their machines - but its perspectives widen dramatically to take in the whole cosmos, where mankind may yet seek a further and more glorious destiny. This was to become a central myth of sf, and many images of GALACTIC EMPIRE include nostalgic portraits of stagnant backwater Earth. These are not, of course, images of the future of destiny but rather attempts to perpetuate and magnify the historical image - as is obvious in the many epics which construct galactic history by analogy with Earthly history.Images of far-future Earth became more varied in the sf of the 1950s; notable examples include a number of highly stylized and semi-allegorical vignettes by Fritz LEIBER, including "When the Last Gods Die" (1951) and "The Big Trek" (1957), as well as many fine stories by Brian W. ALDISS, including the later items in The Canopy of Time (coll 1959; rev vt Galaxies Like Grains of Sand), "Old Hundredth" (1960), the stories making up The Long Afternoon of Earth (fixup 1962 US; exp vt Hothouse UK), "A Kind of Artistry" (1962) and "The Worm that Flies" (1968). As with all the stories in this category, these tend towards FANTASY, and some controversy was stirred up by a particularly memorable image in The Long Afternoon of Earth, in which gigantic cobwebs stretch between the Earth and the Moon, whose faces are now perpetually turned to one another. Other innovative uses of far-future settings can be seen in John BRUNNER's elegiac adventure story The 100th Millennium (1959; rev vt Catch a Falling Star 1968), Samuel R. DELANY's exotic romance The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Jack Vance's elegant political allegory THE LAST CASTLE (1966), Michael MOORCOCK's angst-ridden The Twilight Man (1966; vt The Shores of Death) and Crawford KILIAN's exotic romance of maturation Eyas (1982).Michael Moorcock's fondness for far-future settings encouraged him to break new ground in his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (1972-6) and various other works associated with it. In this series, whose tone ranges from extravagant SATIRE to perverse sentimentality, the ultimate future is inhabited by humans with godlike powers who must perpetually seek diversion from the tedium of their limitless existence. Other writers who have made frequent and significant use of far-future imagery in recent times include Robert SILVERBERG, in such works as the surreal Son of Man (1971) and "This is the Road" (1973), Doris PISERCHIA, in such works as A Billion Days of Earth (1976) and Earth in Twilight (1981), and Michael G. CONEY in The Celestial Steam Locomotive (1983), Gods of the Greataway (1984) and other associated works.There are no anthologies dealing specifically with this theme, and it is worth noting that Harry HARRISON's attempt to compile a companion volume to his near-future anthology The Year 2000 (anth 1970), to be entitled The Year 2,000,000, failed to attract sufficient suitable submissions. The theme does not lend itself readily to conventional plot and character development. [BS]See also: DEVOLUTION; ENTROPY; MYTHOLOGY. FARJEON, J(OSEPH) JEFFERSON (1883-1955) UK writer, prolific (often as Anthony Swift) in the detective genre and as a playwright. The RURITANIAN Mountain Mystery (1935) depicts the small country of Weldheim, which loses itself to history after WWI, becoming a kind of LOST WORLD. Death of a World (1948) depicts the arrival of aliens on a dead Earth and their reading of the diary (which makes up the bulk of the text) kept by a last survivor of the nuclear DISASTER that ended all life ( END OF THE WORLD). [JC]Other works: The Invisible Companion and Other Stories (coll 1946 chap), fantasies. FARLEY, RALPH MILNE Pseudonym of US writer and teacher Roger Sherman Hoar (1887-1963) for all his sf work except two 1938 stories published in AMZ as by Lt John Pease. He was educated at Harvard and had a remarkably varied career, which included teaching such subjects as mathematics and engineering, inventing a system of aiming large guns by the stars, and serving as a Massachusetts state senator. His early work in the pulp-sf field was written in obvious imitation of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and was contributed to The ARGOSY - notably his most famous series, the Radio Man series, featuring Miles Cabot, which began with The Radio Man (1924 Argosy; 1948; vt An Earthman on Venus 1950) and continued with The Radio Beasts (1925 Argosy; 1964), The Radio Planet (1926 Argosy; 1964), "The Radio Man Returns" (1939 AMZ) and "The Radio Minds of Mars" (1955 Spaceway, part 1 only; part 2 in Spaceway 1969). Other "radio" stories - including novels which did not reach book form, such as "The Radio Flyers" (1929 Argosy) and "The Radio Gun-Runners" (1930 Argosy) - are out of series. The tales, at first absurdly boosted by The Argosy as scientifically accurate, are devoted to the adventures of Cabot, mostly on VENUS, the Radio Planet, and still have admirers. Along with another novel, The Hidden Universe (1939 AMZ; with "We, the Mist" as coll 1950), The Radio Man was later assembled as Strange Worlds (omni 1953). RMF was a rough-hewn, traditional SENSE-OF-WONDER writer, and as a consequence became relatively inactive with the greater sophistication of the genre after WWII. [JC/PN]Other works: Dangerous Love (fixup 1946 chap UK); The Immortals (1934 Argosy; 1947 chap UK); The Omnibus of Time (coll 1950).See also: ALIENS; COMICS; ESCHATOLOGY; HISTORY OF SF; HIVE-MINDS; MATTER TRANSMISSION; PLANETARY ROMANCE; PULP MAGAZINES; TIME PARADOXES; TIME TRAVEL. FARMER, PHILIP JOSE (1918- ) US writer. Although a voracious reader of sf in his youth, PJF was a comparatively late starter as an author, and his first story, "O'Brien and Obrenov" for Adventure in 1946, promised little. A part-time student at Bradley University, he gained a BA in English in 1950, and two years later burst onto the sf scene with his novella THE LOVERS (1952 Startling Stories; exp 1961; rev 1979). Although originally rejected by John W. CAMPBELL Jr of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION and H.L. GOLD of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, it gained instant acclaim and won PJF a 1953 HUGO for Most Promising New Author. It concerned XENOBIOLOGY, PARASITISM and SEX, an explosive mixture which was to feature repeatedly in PJF's best work. After writing such excellent short stories as "Sail On! Sail On!" (1952) and "Mother" (1953), PJF became a full-time writer. His second short novel, A Woman a Day (1953 Startling Stories; rev 1960; vt The Day of Timestop 1968; vt Timestop! 1970), was billed as a sequel to THE LOVERS but bore little relation to the earlier story. "Rastignac the Devil" (1954) was a further sequel. PJF then produced two novels, both of which were accepted for publication but neither of which actually saw print at the time, the first due to the folding of STARTLING STORIES (it eventually appeared as Dare [1965]). The second, I Owe for the Flesh, won a contest held by SHASTA PRESS and Pocket Books, but the Pocket Books prize money was used by Shasta founder Melvin Korshak to pay bills, Shasta foundered, and the manuscript was lost (the idea eventually formed the basis of the Riverworld series; see below). This double disaster forced PJF to abandon full-time authorship, a status to which he did not return until 1969.Nevertheless, he produced many interesting stories over the next few years, such as the Father Carmody series in The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION , published in book form as Night of Light (1957 FSF; exp 1966) and Father to the Stars (coll of linked stories 1981), featuring a murderous priest who becomes ambiguously involved in various theological puzzles on several planets. The best of the sequence is Night of Light, a nightmarish story of a world where the figments of the unconscious become tangible. Other notable stories of this period include "The God Business" (1954), "The Alley Man" (1959) and "Open to Me, My Sister" (1960; vt "My Sister's Brother"). The last named is the best of PJF's biological fantasies ( BIOLOGY); like THE LOVERS, it was repeatedly rejected as "disgusting" before its acceptance by FSF.PJF's first novel in book form was The Green Odyssey (1957), a picaresque tale of an Earthman escaping from captivity on an alien planet; the intricately colourful medieval culture of this planet, the high libido of its women, the mysteries buried within the sands of the desert over which the hero must flee, and the admixture of rapture and disgust with which the hero treats the venue - all go to make this novel, along with Jack VANCE's Big Planet (1952 Startling Stories; cut 1957; full text 1978), a model for the flowering of the PLANETARY ROMANCE from the 1960s on. It was the first of many entertainments PJF has written over the years. Later novels in a not dissimilar vein include The Gate of Time (1966; exp vt Two Hawks from Earth 1979), The Stone God Awakens (1970) and The Wind Whales of Ishmael (1971), the last-named being an sf sequel to Herman MELVILLE's Moby-Dick (1851). Flesh (1960; rev 1968) is more ambitious: a dramatization of the ideas which Robert GRAVES put forward in The White Goddess (1947 US), it presents a matriarchal, orgiastic society of the future. Rather heavy-handed in its humour, it was considered a "shocking" novel on first publication. Inside Outside (1964), a novel about a scientifically sustained afterlife, also contains some extraordinary images and grotesque ideas which resonate in the mind, though the book suffers from a lack of resolution. The novella "Riders of the Purple Wage" (1967) - later collected in The Purple Book (coll 1982) and Riders of the Purple Wage (coll 1992) - won PJF a 1968 Hugo; written in a wild and punning style, it is one of his most original works. It concerns the tribulations of a young artist in a UTOPIAN society, and has a more explicit sexual and scatological content than anything PJF had written before. "The Oogenesis of Bird City" (1970) is a related story.The novels assembled as The World of Tiers (omni in 2 vols 1981; vt World of Tiers #1 1986 UK and #2 1986 UK) show PJF in a lighter vein, though the architectural elaborateness of the universe in which they are set prefigures Riverworld. The original volumes are The Maker of Universes (1965; rev 1980), The Gates of Creation (1966; rev 1981), A Private Cosmos (1968; rev 1981), Behind the Walls of Terra (1970; rev 1982) and The Lavalite World (1977; rev 1983). The sequence unfolds within a series of POCKET UNIVERSES, playgrounds built by the masters - who are perhaps gods, originally humanoid - whose technology is unimaginable. The most notable character is the present-day Earthman Paul Janus Finnegan (his initials, PJF, show that this ironic observer serves as a stand-in for the author: it is a signal repeated often in later work); he is also called Kickaha, under which significantly Native American name he acts out the role of a trickster hero indulging in merry, if bloodthirsty, exploits. The books sag in places, but have moments of high invention; and the Jungian models upon which the main characters are constructed supply one key to the understanding of Red Orc's Rage (1991), a novel which RECURSIVELY dramatizes the use of the previous titles in the series as tools in role-playing therapy for disturbed adolescents. In a late addition to the primary sequence, More Than Fire (1993), some of the cosmological puzzles are resolved, and the conflict between Kickaha and Red Orc takes on an increasingly Jungian air, with each being seen as the other's shadow.At about the same time, ESSEX HOUSE, publishers of pornography, commissioned PJF to write three erotic fantasy novels, taking full advantage of the new freedoms of the late 1960s. The Image of the Beast (1968), the first of the Exorcism trilogy, is an effective parody of the private eye and Gothic horror genres. It was followed by a perfunctory sequel, Blown, or Sketches Among the Ruins of my Mind (1969), both being run together into one novel as The Image of the Beast (omni 1979); the third Exorcism volume, Traitor to the Living (1973), was not published by Essex House. The Essex House contract was completed with A Feast Unknown: Volume IX of the Memoirs of Lord Grandrith (1969), the first volume of the Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban series, followed by Lord of the Trees (1970 dos) and The Mad Goblin (1970; vt Keepers of the Secrets 1985 UK), the latter two being assembled as The Empire of the Nine (omni 1988 UK). A Feast Unknown is a brilliant exploration of the sado-masochistic fantasies latent in much heroic fiction, and succeeds as SATIRE, as sf and as a tribute to the creations of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and Lester DENT. It concerns the struggle of Lord Grandrith (Tarzan) and Doc Caliban (Doc Savage) against the Nine, a secret society of immortals. It is a narrative tour de force.All three books point to an abiding concern (or game) that would occupy much of PJF's later career: the tying of his own fiction (and that of many other authors) into one vast, playful mythology. Much of this is worked out in the loose conglomeration of works which has been termed the Wold Newton Family series, all united under the premise that a meteorite which landed near Wold Newton in 18th-century Yorkshire irradiated a number of pregnant women and thus gave rise to a family of mutant SUPERMEN. This family includes the characters involved in the Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban books, as well as several other texts devoted to Tarzan, though excluding Lord Tyger (1970), which is about a millionaire's attempt to create his own ape-man and is possibly the best written of PJF's novels ( APES AND CAVEMEN). Central to Wold Newton is Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (1972), a spoof biography in which PJF uses Joseph Campbell's ideas (from The Hero With a Thousand Faces [1949]) to explore the nature of the HERO's appeal. The appendices and genealogy, which link Tarzan with many other heroes of popular fiction, are at once a satire on scholarship and a serious exercise in "creative mythography". Tarzan appears again in Time's Last Gift (1972; rev 1977), a preliminary novel for a subseries about Ancient Africa, employing settings from Burroughs and H. Rider HAGGARD. Hadon of Ancient Opar (1974) and Flight to Opar (1976) continue the series. Other works which contain Wold Newton material include "Tarzan Lives: An Exclusive Interview with Lord Greystoke" (1972), "The Obscure Life and Hard Times of Kilgore Trout" (1973), Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973; rev 1975), The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), "Extracts from the Memoirs of 'Lord Greystoke'" (1974), "After King Kong Fell" (1974), The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (1974), Ironcastle (1976), a liberally rewritten version of J.H. ROSNY aine's L'etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (1922), and Doc Savage: Escape from Loki: Doc Savage's First Adventure (1991). Other characters incorporated into the sequence include Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, James Bond and Kilgore Trout, a Kurt VONNEGUT character under whose name PJF also published Venus on the Half-Shell (1975). As a whole, the series parlays its conventions of "explanation" into something close to chaos.Though these various books perhaps best express his playfully serious manipulations of popular material to express a sense of the Universe as chaotically fable-like, PJF gained greatest popular acclaim with his Riverworld series, set on a planet where a godlike race has resurrected the whole of humanity along the banks of a multi-million-mile river. The series is made up of TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO (1965-6 Worlds of Tomorrow; fixup 1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1967-71 If; fixup 1971), The Dark Design (1977), Riverworld and Other Stories (coll 1979), The Magic Labyrinth (1980), Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer (coll 1980), The Gods of Riverworld (1983) and River of Eternity (1983), the last being a rediscovered rewrite of the lost I Owe for the Flesh. The first of these won a 1972 Hugo. Such historical personages as Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), Samuel Clemens (Mark TWAIN) and Jack LONDON explore the terrain and relate to one another in their search to understand, in terms mundane and metaphysical, the new universe which has tied them together. As surviving characters begin to overdose on the freedoms (or powers) they have discovered in themselves, the plots of the later volumes become increasingly chaotic, perhaps deliberately, a tendency not reversed in two late anthologies of work by other authors set in the Riverworld universe: Tales of Riverworld *(anth 1992) and Quest to Riverworld* (anth 1993), both ed PJF.After The Unreasoning Mask (1981), an extremely well constructed SPACE OPERA about a search for God, who comprises the Universe but is still a vulnerable child, PJF embarked on the Dayworld series, whose premise derives from "The Sliced-Crossways Only-on-Tuesday World" (1971): in a vastly overcrowded world, the population is divided into seven, each cohort spending one day of the week awake and the rest of the time in "stoned" immobility. In Dayworld (1985), Dayworld Rebel (1987) and Dayworld Breakup (1990), this premise becomes increasingly peripheral in a tale whose complications invoke A.E. VAN VOGT. Here, as in all his work, PJF is governed by an instinct for extremity. Of all sf writers of the first or second rank, he is perhaps the most threateningly impish, and the most anarchic. [DP/JC]Other works: Strange Relations (coll 1960); The Alley God (coll 1962); Fire and the Night (1962), associational; Cache from Outer Space (1962 dos; rev as coll with "Rastignac the Devil" and "They Twinkled like Angels" vt The Cache 1981); The Celestial Blueprint and Other Stories (coll 1962 dos); Tongues of the Moon (1961 AMZ; exp 1964); Reap: The Baycon Guest-of-Honor Speech (1968 chap); Love Song (1970), associational; Down in the Black Gang, and Others (coll 1971); The Book of Philip Jose Farmer, or The Wares of Simple Simon's Custard Pie and Space Man (coll 1973; rev 1982); Dark is the Sun (1979); Jesus on Mars (1979); Flesh, and Lord Tyger (omni 1981); Greatheart Silver (coll of linked stories 1982); A Barnstormer in Oz (1982); Stations of the Nightmare (1974-5 in Continuum #1-#4 ed Roger ELWOOD; coll of linked stories 1982); The Classic Philip Jose Farmer (coll 1984 in 2 vols); The Grand Adventure (coll 1984).As Editor: Mother Was a Lovely Beast: A Feral Man Anthology of Fiction and Fact about Humans Raised by Animals (anth 1974).About the author: "Philip Jose Farmer" by Sam MOSKOWITZ, in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966); "Thanks for the Feast" by Leslie A. Fiedler, in The Book of Philip Jose Farmer (1973); Philip Jose Farmer (1980) by Mary T. Brizzi; Magic Labyrinth of Philip Jose Farmer (1984 chap) by E.L. Chapman; Philip Jose Farmer: Good-Natured Ground Breaker: A Working Bibliography (2nd edn 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ALIENS; COMICS; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; COSMOLOGY; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASY; GAMES AND TOYS; GAME-WORLDS; GODS AND DEMONS; GOTHIC SF; MARS; MESSIAHS; MYTHOLOGY; OVERPOPULATION; PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY; REINCARNATION; RELIGION; SOCIOLOGY; TABOOS; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; VILLAINS. FARNSWORTH, DUNCAN [s] David Wright O'BRIEN. FAR OUT! Australian sf magazine (1985), DIGEST-format, 3 issues, published from Western Australia by Far Out Enterprises, ed anon Pamela Klacar. Subtitled "Australia's own sf/fantasy magazine", FO! published fiction of an amateurish nature by unknown writers. Though (astonishingly) given national distribution, it soon silently disappeared. [PN] FARRELL, JOHN WADE [s] John D. MACDONALD. FARREN, MICK (1943- ) UK writer and ex-rock musician, first active in a band, the Deviants, 1967-70; he then edited the underground paper IT 1970-73 and founded the underground comic Nasty Tales-prosecuted for obscenity in a well known trial - in which, with Chris Rowley and Chris Welch, he produced a comic strip with sf content, Ogoth the Wasted. His first sf novel was The Texts of Festival (1973), set in a surrealistic post- HOLOCAUST England; this novel and his subsequent Jeb Stuart Ho trilogy - The Quest of the DNA Cowboys (1976), Synaptic Manhunt (1976) and The Neural Atrocity (1977)-radiate a late-1960s aura of apocalyptic, hip hyperbole, sometimes effectively. The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys (1989) is a loose sequel. The world of the trilogy especially is almost deliriously polymorphic, full of images out of Westerns and other genres and references to dope, rock and the hippy subculture generally, and can be seen as a clear precursor of CYBERPUNK, though without COMPUTERS, and laced throughout with the kind of drug use which later writers like William GIBSON were able to avoid through the various delights of CYBERSPACE.MF's next novels were similar in texture. Both The Feelies (1978; rev 1990 US), a left-oriented SATIRE whose premise resembles that of John D. MACDONALD's "Spectator Sport" (1950), and the dithery The Song of Phaid the Gambler (1981; rev vt in 2 vols as Phaid the Gambler 1986 US and Citizen Phaid 1987 US) seemed paralysed by their 1960s provenance. After Protectorate (1984) his work began to seem derivative of the cyberpunk writers who had followed him. Corpse (1986; vt Vickers 1988 US), The Long Orbit (1988 US; vt Exit Funtopia 1989 UK) and Armageddon Crazy (1989 US) have in common violent action, desolate NEAR-FUTURE venues and spiritual malaise. Their Master's War (1988 US) concerns the ruthless use of helpless species in an unending interstellar conflict. [JC]Other works: Mars - The Red Planet (1990 US); Necrom (1991). FARRERE, CLAUDE Pseudonym of French writer Frederic Charles Pierre Edouard Bargone (1876-1957), author mainly of "colonial" novels after the model of Pierre Loti (1850-1923). His sf books are La maison des hommes vivants (1911; trans Arthur Livingston as The House of the Secret 1923 US) and, more notably, Les condamnes a mort (1920; trans Elisabeth Abbott as Useless Hands 1926 US; 1973 US as by Charles Bargone), whose harsh social-Darwinist terms render a 1990s workers' revolt as bleakly pathetic: when the "useless hands" go on strike, they are disintegrated by a new weapon and machines take over their jobs. [JC]Other works: Black Opium (coll trans Samuel Putnam 1929 US), tales linked by reference to opium.See also: AUTOMATION; DYSTOPIAS; SOCIAL DARWINISM. FAST, HOWARD (MELVIN) (1914- ) US writer best known for his work outside the sf field: historical novels under his own name and detective novels and thrillers as E.V. Cunningham. The Unvanquished (1942) and Spartacus (1951), both as HF, are perhaps his most familiar titles. He began publishing sf with "Wrath of the Purple" for AMZ in 1932, but did not actively produce sf until the later 1950s, when he started a long association with FSF. His sf and fantasy stories have been collected in The Edge of Tomorrow (coll 1961), The General Zapped an Angel (coll 1970) and A Touch of Infinity (coll 1973); all the stories in the latter two volumes were reassembled as Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (coll 1975). His work is sharply political in implication - he was a member of the Communist Party 1943-56, being imprisoned for contempt of Congress in 1947 - and eschews most of the cruder satisfactions of genre fiction. Harlan ELLISON, among others, has expressed high praise for HF's stories, but admiration, though widespread, is not universal. Some critics have seen their occasionally religiose moralizing as cloying and their ideative content as trite. Phyllis (1962), as by E.V. Cunningham, is a borderline novel in which a US and a Soviet scientist come together to try to force their governments to ban the bomb by threatening to explode two themselves. In "The Trap", a novel-length tale which occupies most of The Hunter and The Trap (coll 1967), the US Government secretly attempts to raise exceptional children in a monitored environment; when the Department of Defense attempts to view the results the children, now telepathic, close themselves off from the world to breed Homo superior. [JC]Other works: Tony and the Wonderful Door (1968; vt The Magic Door 1980), a juvenile.See also: SATIRE. FAST, JONATHAN (DAVID) (1948- ) US composer and writer, son of Howard FAST, who wrote music before coming to sf with "Decay" for FSF in 1975. His first novel, The Secrets of Synchronicity (1977; vt Prisoner of the Planets 1980 UK), is a complex SPACE OPERA which, unusually for the form, treats an expanding capitalism as inherently repressive of true freedom. In Mortal Gods (1978) a similar enemy maintains control over a culture shaped by the possibilities of GENETIC ENGINEERING. The tone of his writing, which is generally light, and his plotting, which is contrived, tend to obscure the political arguments underlying his work. [JC]Other works: The Inner Circle (1979); The Beast (1981), a fantasy. FASTER THAN LIGHT According to Relativity the velocity of light is limiting: no matter how objects alter their velocity relative to one another, the sum of their velocities can never exceed the ultimate constant c (the velocity of light in a vacuum); moreover, the measurement of c is unaffected by the velocity of the measurer. The apparently paradoxical implications of this statement are avoided because objects travelling at high velocities relative to one another are subject to different frames of measurement, by which each appears to the other to be subject to a distortion of time. As a consequence, SPACESHIPS which make interstellar journeys at velocities close to light-speed relative to their points of origin are subject to a time-dilatation whereby the travellers age more slowly than the people they left at home. A good popularization of such ideas can be found in George GAMOW's book of scientific fables Mr Tompkins in Wonderland (coll 1939 chap).Some "relativistic" effects of FTL travel are described in Camille FLAMMARION's pre-Einsteinian cosmic fantasy Lumen (1887; trans 1897), but other early sf writers, including the pioneers of pulp SPACE-OPERA, ignored such matters, even after Relativity theory had come into being. As the intellectual respectability of such ignorance declined, however, the limiting velocity of light increasingly became an awkward inconvenience to writers of interstellar adventure stories, necessitating the development of a series of facilitating devices - often involving "space-warps", interdimensional dodges into HYPERSPACE or "subspace", or, more recently, TACHYON drives or BLACK-HOLE-related "wormholes" - to enable the sciencefictional imagination to retain GALACTIC EMPIRES and their effectively infinite supply of earthlike ALIEN worlds ripe for COLONIZATION. Faster-than-light communication systems like James BLISH's DIRAC transmitter and Ursula K. LE GUIN's ANSIBLE require similar justificatory fudges. Such literary devices cannot, in fact, succeed in setting aside the logical difficulties which arise if Einstein's theory is true, but FTL drives of various kinds are so very useful in avoiding the inconveniences of GENERATION STARSHIPS that many writers of HARD SF insist on clinging to the hope that the theory may be imperfect in such a way as to permit an exploitable loophole. Faster than Light (anth 1976), a theme anthology ed Jack DANN and George ZEBROWSKI, includes, as well as the stories, several essays combatively arguing the case. Other writers, however, have found the time-dilatation effects associated with relativistic star-travel a rich source of plot ideas.John W. CAMPBELL Jr was the writer who laid the groundwork for such facilitating devices as the space-warp (in Islands of Space, 1931; 1957) and hyperspace (in The Mightiest Machine, 1934; 1947), where the term made its debut; where he led legions followed. Stories which work harder than most to make such notions plausible include Robert A. HEINLEIN's Starman Jones (1953), Murray LEINSTER's The Other Side of Nowhere (1964), A. Bertram CHANDLER's Catch the Star Winds (1969) and David ZINDELL's Neverness (1988). Memorable imagery relating to hypothetical means of FTL travel can be found in James Blish's tales of cities-become-starships by courtesy of the SPINDIZZY, CITIES IN FLIGHT (omni 1970), and in Kenneth BULMER's "Strange Highway" (1960) and Bob SHAW's The Palace of Eternity (1969). Some memorable imagery attempting (mistakenly, as it later turned out) to envisage real relativistic visual effects can be found in Frederik POHL's "The Gold at the Starbow's End" (1972; exp as Starburst 1982). Many sf stories suggest that the pilots of FTL spaceships may have to be specially adapted to the task, sometimes by cyborgization ( CYBORGS), becoming more-or-less alienated from their own kind; notable examples include Cordwainer SMITH's "Scanners Live in Vain" (1950), Gerard F. CONWAY's Mindship (1974), Joan COX's Star Web (1980), Vonda MCINTYRE's Superluminal (1984), Melissa SCOTT's trilogy begun with Five Twelfths of Heaven (1985), and Emma BULL's Falcon (1989). Norman SPINRAD's The Void-Captain's Tale (1983) deals ironically with sf symbolism of this general kind, featuring a phallic spaceship powered by a libidinous "psychological drive".Sf stories which play with time-dilatation effects include Fredric BROWN's flippant "Placet is a Crazy Place" (1946), L. Ron HUBBARD's earnest Return to Tomorrow (1950; 1954), Blish's "Common Time" (1953), Heinlein's Time for the Stars (1956), which deploys, literally, the celebrated "twins paradox", Vladislav Krapivin's "Meeting my Brother" (trans 1966), Joe HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER WAR (fixup 1975), Larry NIVEN's A World Out of Time (fixup 1976), Tom Allen's "Not Absolute" (1978) and George TURNER's Beloved Son (1978). Such effects are taken to spectacular extremes in Poul ANDERSON's Tau Zero (1970), whose protagonists are permitted to outlive the Universe, and in Pohl's and Jack WILLIAMSON's even more expansive The Singers of Time (1991).The elementary changes have now been rung, but there is probably further scope for intriguing time-dilatation plots. One such is Redshift Rendezvous (1990) by John E. STITH, set on a starship in a version of hyperspace in which the velocity of light is so low (22mph/35kph) that its passage is visible, and relativistic phenomena are obvious at walking speed. In the mean time, FTL facilitating devices will undoubtedly continue to do sterling work for the extravagantly inclined sf writer. [BS] FATHERLAND Made-for-tv film (1994). Home Box Office. Prod Frederick Muller and Ilene Kahn, dir Christopher Menaul, screenplay Stanley Weiser and Ron Hutchinson, based on the novel Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris, Staring Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson. 106 mins. Colour.The year is 1964, the place Berlin, in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which HITLER WINS the Second World War. The USA, which stayed out of the war against Germany and is now led by President Joseph Kennedy senior, is holding talks about detente with Adolf Hitler on the day of Hitler's 75th birthday, April 20th. Hitler needs American friendship, because Germania's (sic) guerilla war with Russia (still led by Stalin) is dragging on. The SS now act as a police force. SS officer March (Hauer) and German-born American journalist Charlie (Richardson) have separately stumbled across a series of murders designed to keep a dreadful wartime secret concealed, and after a time they work together to solve the mystery, in constant danger from the virulent Gestapo. The secret turns out to be the Holocaust. If the mass murder of the Jews (and Gypsies) is revealed, detente will crumble. Apart from the fundamental (and perhaps tasteless) absurdity of the film supposing that so abominable a happening, known to many thousands, should have remained a secret for more than twenty years, this is a well-staged and well-performed political thriller, interesting in its examination of the ways in which a police state can contrive to show the world an apparently acceptable face. The film was shot in Prague. [PN] FAUCETTE, JOHN M(ATTHEW) Jr (1943- ) US writer whose sf novels, including Crown of Infinity (1968) and The Age of Ruin (1968), are routine works, the first a SPACE OPERA, the second a post- DISASTER odyssey. The Peacemakers series, in which alien invaders are fought to a negotiated truce, comprises The Warriors of Terra (1970) and Siege of Earth (1971). [JC] FAULCON, ROBERT Robert P. HOLDSTOCK. FAUST, JOE CLIFFORD (1957- ) US copywriter and author who began publishing sf with "The Jackalope's Tale" for Wyoming Rural Electric News in 1983. His first novel, A Death of Honor (1987), is an sf mystery set in a 21st century moderately displaced in the direction of CYBERPUNK, where a Constitutional Amendment has entitled victims of crime to pursue the perpetrators; the mystery itself is worked out with extremely satisfying care. His second novel, The Company Man (1988), enters even more familiar cyberpunk territory by featuring a protagonist who steals data for a large corporation which partially runs the decaying world, and who soon faces a moral crisis. In the Angel's Luck trilogy - Desperate Measures (1989), Precious Cargo (1990) and The Essence of Evil (1990) - JCF created a romping SPACE OPERA whose spiralling intricacies of plot, as the freelance protagonists who run the starship Angel's Luck get into deeper and deeper waters, are recounted with the rigorous plot-control for which he has become known and with a sly sustaining humour. As a professing Christian, JCF has an avowed allegiance to what he has called "old-fashioned virtues"; so far, however, his tales show no signs of doctrinal purpose. [JC]See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. FAWCETT, BILL Working name of US anthologist, packager and writer William Brian Fawcett (1947- ). His fiction has generally been collaborative: examples include Cold Cash Warrior (1989) with Robert ASPRIN and Lord of Cragslaw * (1989) with Neil Randall, a novel tied to the Guardians of the Three sequence, Lord of Cragslaw * (1989) (for details of books with David A. DRAKE and Christopher STASHEFF, see their entries). Solo, BF has been responsible for the SwordQuest fantasy sequence: Quest for the Unicorn's Horn (1985), Quest for the Dragon's Eye (1985), Quest for the Demon Gate (1986) and Quest for the Elf King (1987). As anthologist, he created the War Years sequence of ties, including War Years #1: The Far Stars War * (anth 1990), #2: The Siege of Arista * (anth 1991) with Stasheff, and #3: The Jupiter War * (anth 1991). Also with Stasheff, he ed The Crafters (anth 1991) and The Crafters #2: Bellsings and Curses (anth 1992), and with Robert SILVERBERG he ed Time Gate (anth 1989) Further solo anthologies include Cats in Space (anth 1992) and the Bolo sequence set in the universe created by Keith LAUMER: Bolos: Honor of the Regiment * (anth 1993) and Bolos #2: The Unconquerable (anth 1994). [JC]See also: SHARED WORLDS. FAWCETT, EDGAR (1847-1904) US writer, known primarily for his work outside the sf field. Most of his 40 or so novels belong to the realist school associated with his contemporary William Dean HOWELLS, but (like Howells) BF also wrote imaginative works. He provided a manifesto for a species of fiction which he called "realistic romance", which is very similar to some DEFINITIONS OF SF: "Stories where the astonishing and peculiar are blent with the possible and accountable. They may be as wonderful as you will, but they must not touch on the mere flimsiness of miracle. They can be excessively improbable, but their improbability must be based upon scientific fact, and not upon fantastic, emotional and purely imaginative groundwork." This statement is from the introduction to The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895), a novel whose hero discovers a drug which separates his soul from his body and must undertake a voyage into the further reaches of the cosmos when his uninhabited body is cremated. Earlier and more modest works in the same vein are Douglas Duane (1887), a personality-exchange story, Solarion (1889), a novel about a dog with artificially augmented intelligence, and The Romance of Two Brothers (1891), which features a problematic elixir of life. The New Nero (1893), a study in abnormal psychology concerning a man who believes himself to be a mass murderer, is of borderline interest. Some of EF's POETRY is also relevant, most notably "In the Year Ten Thousand" in Songs of Doubt and Dream (coll 1891). An early supernatural story of some note is "He, She and It" (1871). He copyrighted several unpublished manuscripts, some of which appear to have been sf. [BS]About the author: "The Realistic Romances of Edgar Fawcett" by Brian M. STABLEFORD, Foundation #24 (Feb 1982).See also: COSMOLOGY; EVOLUTION; MOON; RELIGION. FAWCETT, E(DWARD) DOUGLAS (1866-1960) UK writer and mystical thinker, long resident in Switzerland. His first (and best-known) sf novel, Hartmann the Anarchist, or The Doom of the Great City (1893), illustrated by Fred T. JANE, features a 1920s anarchist revolution against a wicked, capitalist UK, with London being destroyed by airships; but, in the face of opposition and gripped by guilt, the rebel Hartmann eventually destroys himself and the Attila, his fearsome airship, and all is well. The HOLLOW EARTH featured in Swallowed by an Earthquake (1894), a juvenile, is non-Symmesian ( John Cleves SYMMES) and uncompellingly cluttered with prehistoric reptiles. The Secret of the Desert, or How We Crossed Arabia in the "Antelope" (1895) is about a secret amphibious tank which crosses Arabia, finding there a lost race ( LOST WORLDS) of Phoenicians. [JC] FAWCETT, FAUSTO [r] LATIN AMERICA. FAWCETT, F(RANK) DUBREZ (1891-1968) UK writer active in various genres under his own name and several others from 1923; non-sf pseudonyms included Cass Borelli, Henri Dupres, Madame E. Farra, "GRIFF", Eugene Glen, Duke Linton, Coolidge McCann, Elmer Eliot Saks, Ben Sarto and Hank Spencer. Much of his output consisted of such thrillers as Miss Otis Comes to Piccadilly (1946), as by Ben Sarto, and its many quite popular successors. The Wonderful Isle of Ulla-Gapoo (1946) is a mild fantasy. FDF's only known sf novel proper is Hole in Heaven (1954), about a human body possessed by an other-dimensional ALIEN. Air-Gods' Parade (1935), as by Simpson Stokes, and The Dubious Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1948) may be of some interest. [JC] FAX COLLECTOR'S EDITIONS US SMALL PRESS established by T.E. DIKTY with Darrell C. Richardson in 1972, and devoted to publishing material from and about PULP MAGAZINES. Its publications include several collections of obscure Robert E. HOWARD stories, two anthology series in facsimile under the titles Famous Fantastic Classics and Famous Pulp Classics, and The Weird Tales Story (1977), a large volume written and ed Robert E. WEINBERG. An associated and more prolific company, also founded by Dikty, is STARMONT HOUSE. [MJE] FAYETTE, J.B. JUPITER; OUTER PLANETS. FEARING, KENNETH (1902-1961) US poet and novelist, known mainly for mysteries like The Big Clock (1946), a tale whose atmosphere adumbrates the film-noir tonality of later US fantasy. Within a mystery frame, The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951) is borderline sf. KG's only sf novel proper is Clark Gifford's Body (1942), which gravely and literately portrays a future US civil war. [JC] FEARN, JOHN (FRANCIS) RUSSELL (1908-1960) UK writer; extremely prolific, he used many pseudonyms. During the 1930s he wrote for magazines, including the US PULP MAGAZINES, but during WWII he switched to books. He became a central figure in the post-WWII paperback boom, writing numerous Westerns, crime stories and probably some romances as well as his sf, most of which appeared under the names Vargo Statten and Volsted GRIDBAN (the latter pseudonym being taken over from E.C. TUBB). In the pulps he wrote many stories as Thornton Ayre and Polton Cross, and also used the names Geoffrey Armstrong, Dennis Clive, John Cotton and Ephriam Winiki; his sf books and crime stories with sf elements include items signed with the personal pseudonyms Spike Gordon, Conrad G. Holt, Laurence F. Rose, John Russell and Earl Titan, and the house names Astron DEL MARTIA, "GRIFF", Paul LORRAINE and Brian SHAW.JRF's first GENRE-SF work was the early SUPERMAN story The Intelligence Gigantic (1933 AMZ; 1943). It was followed by the extravagant Liners of Time (1935 AMZ; 1947) and its sequel "Zagribud" (1937 AMZ; cut vt Science Metropolis by Vargo Statten 1952); he subsequently wrote a good deal for ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION while it was edited by F. Orlin TREMAINE, contributing numerous "thought-variant" stories, some of which he later expanded into Vargo Statten novels, including Nebula X (1946 as "The Multillionth Chance" by JRF; rev 1950), The Sun Makers (1937 as "Metamorphosis" by JRF; rev 1950), The Avenging Martian (1938 as "Red Heritage" by JRF; rev 1951), The Renegade Star (1935 as "The Blue Infinity" by JRF; rev 1951), The Inner Cosmos (1937 as "Worlds Within" by JRF; rev 1952), To the Ultimate (1936 as "Mathematica" and "Mathematica Plus" by JRF; rev 1952) and The Dust Destroyer (1934 as "The Man who Stopped the Dust" by JRF; rev 1953).Four Thornton Ayre novelettes in FANTASTIC ADVENTURES featuring the superwoman - or Golden Amazon - Violet Ray were extensively revised into the novel The Golden Amazon (1939-43; 1944), which was reprinted in the Toronto Star Weekly to such acclaim that 23 sequels followed, the last appearing posthumously there in 1961. Those which have subsequently appeared in book form are: The Golden Amazon Returns (1945; 1949; vt The Deathless Amazon 1953 Canada), The Golden Amazon's Triumph (1946; 1953), The Amazon's Diamond Quest (1947 as "Diamond Quest"; 1953), The Amazon Strikes Again (1948; 1954), Twin of the Amazon (1948; 1954), Conquest of the Amazon (1949; 1973 chap) and Lord of Atlantis (1949; 1991 chap). Two other series are Edgar Rice BURROUGHS imitations: the Clayton Drew interplanetary romances Emperor of Mars (1950), Warrior of Mars (1950), Red Men of Mars (1950) and Goddess of Mars (1950); and the Anjani sequence of Tarzan imitations signed Earl Titan: The Gold of Akada (1951) and Anjani, the Mighty (1951). JFR also wrote the book of the notable 1954 schlock-horror film The CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON , The Creature from the Black Lagoon * (1954) as Vargo Statten.Scion, publishers of Vargo Statten, created the VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, although JRF did not become its editor immediately; it underwent several title changes in the course of its short life.JRF's writing was unpolished and his use of ideas imaginatively reckless, but his best work is vigorous and occasionally vivid. His works have sometimes proved popular in translation; he enjoyed something of a boom in Italy in the 1970s. [BS]Other works as JRF: Slaves of Ijax (1947 chap); Operation Venus (1950); From Afar (1982 chap); No Grave Need I (1984 chap); The Slitherers (1984 chap).As Hugo Blayn: What Happened to Hammond? (1951).As Dennis Clive: Valley of Pretenders (c1942 chap US); The Voice Commands (c1942 chap US).As Polton Cross: Other Eyes Watching (1946).As Astron del Martia (house name): The Trembling World (1949).As Spike Gordon: Don't Touch Me (1953).As Volsted Gridban: The Dyno-Depressant (1953); Magnetic Brain (1953); Moons for Sale (1953); Scourge of the Atom (1948 as "After the Atom" by JRF; rev 1953); the Herbert sequence, comprising A Thing of the Past (1953) and The Genial Dinosaur 1954); Exit Life (1941 as "The World in Wilderness" by Thornton Ayre; rev 1953); the Adam Quirke sequence, comprising The Master Must Die (1953) and The Lonely Astronomer (partly based on "Death at the Observatory" 1938 by JRF; 1954); The Purple Wizard (1953); The Frozen Limit (1954); I Came - I Saw - I Wondered (1954).As "Griff" (house name): Liquid Death (1953).As Conrad G. Holt: Cosmic Exodus (1953 chap).As Paul Lorraine (house name): Dark Boundaries (1953).As Laurence F. Rose: The Hell-Fruit (1953 chap).As John Russell: Account Settled (1949).As Brian Shaw (house name): Z-Formations (1953).As Vargo Statten: Annihilation (1950); The Micro-Men (1950); Wanderer of Space (1950); 2000 Years On (1950); Inferno! (1950); The Cosmic Flame (1950); Cataclysm (1944 as "The Devouring Tide" by Polton Cross; rev 1951); The Red Insects (1951); The New Satellite (1951); Deadline to Pluto (1951); The Petrified Planet (1951); Born of Luna (1951); The Devouring Fire (1951); The Catalyst (1951); The Space Warp (1952); The Eclipse Express (1952); The Time Bridge (1942 as "Prisoner of Time" by Polton Cross; rev 1952); The Man from Tomorrow (1950 as "Stranger in our Midst" by JRF; rev 1952); The G-Bomb (1941 as "The Last Secret Weapon" by Polton Cross; rev 1952); Laughter in Space (1939 as "Laughter out of Space" by Dennis Clive; rev 1952); Across the Ages (1952 as "Glimpse" by JRF; 1952 chap); The Last Martian (1952 chap); Worlds to Conquer (1952 chap); De-Creation (1952 chap); The Time Trap (1952 chap); Ultra Spectrum (1953); Black-Wing of Mars (1953 as "Winged Pestilence" by JRF; 1953); Man in Duplicate (1953); Zero Hour (1952 as "Deadline" by JRF; 1953); The Black Avengers (1953); Odyssey of Nine (1953); Pioneer 1990 (1940 as "He Conquered Venus" by JRF; rev 1953); The Interloper (1953); Man of Two Worlds (1953); The Lie Destroyer (1953); Black Bargain (1953); The Grand Illusion (1953); Wealth of the Void (1954); A Time Appointed (1954); I Spy (1954); The Multi-Man (1954); 1,000 Year Voyage (1954); Earth 2 (1955).About the author: The Multi-Man (1968 chap) by Philip HARBOTTLE.See also: BOYS' PAPERS; CLONES; TIME TRAVEL. FEELEY, GREGORY (1955- ) US critic and writer whose essays and book reviews have appeared throughout the 1980s in various journals from the Washington Post to FOUNDATION. Sometimes adversarial, unfailingly intelligent, they represent a cold-eyed view of a genre he loves by a critic immersed in its material. Although he began publishing sf with "The Light at the End of the Penumbra" in Ascents of Wonder (anth 1977) ed David GERROLD, GF did not become active as an author of fiction for about a decade. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons (1990), served therefore as a sort of debut, surprising some by turning out to be a HARD-SF tale of a terraformed Moon ( TERRAFORMING). In what seems a perfectly standard fashion, colonists and a giant corporation are at loggerheads; it is only the labyrinth of the plot that exposes the novel as other than orthodox. [JC] FEGHOOTS Reginald BRETNOR; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION . FEINTUCH, DAVID (? - ) US writer whose Nick Seafort series, beginning with Midshipman's Hope (1994), depicts the life and adventures of a young cadet on a spaceship whose rituals are extremely like that of a planet-bound, even 19th century, navy: specifically the navy in which C.S. FORESTER's Horatio Hornblower serves. Three further volumes are expected. [JC] FEKETE, GYULA [r] HUNGARY. FELDSTEIN, ALBERT B. [r] EC COMICS. FELICE, CYNTHIA (LINDGREN) (1942- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Longshanks" for Galileo 2 in 1976. Her first novel, Godsfire (1978), depicts an ALIEN planet inhabited by felines who dominate the local humans but who have never seen their sun because of the unending rain. Almost too well constructed - almost facile in its zestful plotting - the book demonstrated CF's technical skill, her romantic inclinations and a tendency to slough off hard solutions. Her next book, The Sunbound (1981), for instance, failed to produce a protagonist capable of hewing to CF's intricate plot demands without seeming an arbitrary creation, yet the family romance at the tale's heart required characters who could be intrinsically believed in. Of her later solo singletons, Downtime (1985) interestingly combined a longevity intrigue in a distant solar system, aliens, and romance, but The Khan's Persuasion (1991) once again demonstrated a gap between the quality of her sf perceptions and the easy flow of the plotty romance idiom through which she presents characters. CF's two collaborations with Connie WILLIS, Water Witch (1982) and Light Raid (1989), benefit from Willis's significantly harsher mind but are still somewhat heavily plotted. [JC]Other works: Eclipses (1983); Double Nocturne (1986); Iceman (1991).See also: WEAPONS. FEMINISM Although a genre defined and long dominated by men, sf has a particular affinity with feminism. This became clear in the 1970s with the publication of such challenging books as THE FEMALE MAN (1975) by Joanna RUSS, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974) and Motherlines (1978) by Suzy McKee CHARNAS and WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME (1976) by Marge PIERCY.One of the most obvious attractions of sf to women writers - feminist or not - is the possibilities it offers for the creation of a female HERO. The demands of realism in the contemporary or historical novel set limits which do not bind the universes available to sf. Although the history of sf reveals few heroic, realistic, or even original images of women ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION), the genre had a potential recognized by the women writers drawn to it in the 1960s and 1970s. The desire to write (or read) about women who wield swords, pilot spaceships or simply lead lives from which the threat of male violence is absent might be seen as escapist, but such imaginings can also be read as part of a political agenda. As Pamela SARGENT wrote in a letter to Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Fall 1977, "Science-fiction writers are limited only by human potential, not human actualities. Sf can serve to show women, and men, how large that potential can be." And Suzy McKee Charnas remarked in the same journal: "Women's realities are still highly circumscribed by various forms of oppression . . . One place for us to imagine new strengths, goals, and ways of being human is in the world of fantasy, where we can work around our present limitations in ways that may help to point us . . . out of and beyond those limitations."Despite the reputation sf has as a mind-expanding, possibly subversive, always questioning form, these strengths were seldom brought to bear on the subject of male/female relationships, sexual roles or the idea of "woman's place" prior to the rise of the Women's Liberation Movement. As Kingsley AMIS pointed out in New Maps of Hell (1960 US), "Though it may go against the grain to admit it, science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo." He was referring, of course, to male sf writers. With a very few exceptions (e.g., Philip WYLIE's The Disappearance [1951], Theodore STURGEON's Venus Plus X [1960] and John WYNDHAM's "Consider Her Ways" [1956]), the men who tried to imagine alternatives to patriarchy did so only to "prove" how nasty and impossible life would be without the "natural" dominance of woman by man. (For more novels featuring women-ruled societies SOCIOLOGY.)One of the major challenges of modern feminism has been to the idea that gender roles and relations are in some way permanent, arising from a natural and immutable law. In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) Shulasmith Firestone located the site of women's oppression in their role as child-bearers and -rearers, and argued that feminist revolution would not be possible until women were freed not only from the sole responsibility for child-rearing (which should be taken by society as a whole) but also, by technology, from the tyranny of reproduction. Although the idea that women might have to give up the physical act of child-bearing in order to achieve a truly egalitarian society has never achieved wide popularity, the force of Firestone's argument is powerfully illustrated in Marge Piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, and its influence can be traced also in the writings of Charnas, Russ and Sally Miller GEARHART.Not all work by women writers is feminist - not even when it concentrates on the "woman question" - and there are different interpretations of what comprises feminist sf. The only specifically labelled feminist sf list from any publisher is the one established by The Women's Press in the UK under the direction of Sarah LEFANU in 1985. Anything published by The Women's Press, sf included, is considered, by definition, feminist, and is often ghettoized in bookshops. Yet many of the books on this list were first published in the USA and even in the UK by nonfeminist houses either as straightforward sf, as for example A Door into Ocean (1986) by Joan SLONCZEWSKI, or as mainstream literature, like The Book of the Night (1984) by Rhoda Lerman (1936- ). The Women's Press list also includes books by writers who had not previously been seen as, and would not define themselves as, feminist writers, such as Josephine SAXTON and Tanith LEE.Diane Martin, an editor of the fanzine Aurora (where sf stands for "speculative feminism" - JANUS/AURORA), in 1990 proposed, with tongue slightly in cheek, "The Martin Scale" as a tool for measuring the feminist content of a work of sf or fantasy:Level One: Doubts about patriarchy/women escaping victimization (e.g., most Andre NORTON novels)Level Two: Men and women as equals (e.g., DREAMSNAKE [1978] by Vonda MCINTYRE)Level Three: Women are better than men on some levels (e.g., FrostFlower and Thorn [1980] by Phyllis Ann Karr)Level Four: Women are uniformly better than men (e.g., Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Tomoe Gozen saga)Level Five: Can't live with 'em/can't live without 'em (e.g., "The Women Men Don't See" [1973] by James TIPTREE Jr)Level Six: Men are tragically flawed and pitiable (e.g., Native Tongue [1984] by Suzette Haden ELGIN)Level Seven: Men as slaves (e.g., B-movies like Amazon Women on the Moon [1987]; Joe DANTE)Level Eight: Separatism is necessary for survival (e.g., THE GATE TO WOMEN'S COUNTRY [1988] by Sheri S. TEPPER)Level Nine: Positive depiction of lesbian/feminist utopias (e.g. , The Shore of Women [1986] by Pamela Sargent)Level Ten: Parthenogenesis and/or scenes of actual castration (e.g., Motherlines [1978] by Suzy McKee Charnas)In what is probably the most thoughtful and accessible survey of the topic, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988; vt Feminism and Science Fiction 1989 US) by Sarah Lefanu, the author makes a distinction between feminist sf and "feminized sf". The latter, she argues, while it challenges established sexism by valuing women and feminine values over men and masculinity, and has been an important influence on the development of sf as a whole, does not dispute the man/woman paradigm or question the construction of gender as more radical feminist writings do. Feminist ideas are able to flourish within sf despite reader resistance because, she claims, sf at its best "deploys a sceptical rationalism as its subtext" and "feminism is based upon a profound scepticism: of the 'naturalness' of the patriarchal world and the belief in male superiority on which it is founded".A forerunner to modern feminist sf can be seen in the spate of utopian stories written by women as part of the movement for women's rights which began in the 19th century. Unlike the utopias of male writers, these fictions always question the sexual status quo and foreground the position of women, sometimes - as in Mary E. Bradley LANE's Mizora (1890) and Charlotte Perkins GILMAN's Herland (1914; 1979) - by depicting an all-women society and showing its superiority to societies in which men rule.The utopian tradition in women's writing was forgotten in subsequent decades until its rediscovery by feminist scholars in the 1970s, and there is some worry that, however well established women writers may seem now, the same fate may befall feminist sf. Russ has described many of the ways in which women's work is discounted in How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983); and, in "An Open Letter to Joanna Russ" in Aurora 25 (1987), Jeanne Gomoll expressed her feeling that her own experiences of FANDOM and sf in the 1970s were being rewritten by men choosing to ignore the impact of feminism and characterize a whole decade as "boring" because their personal interests were not always given priority. To many, women as well as men, the revolution is over, equality has been won, and we are living in a post-feminist age. In addition, the label "feminist" has never been either safe or comfortable; while it had in the 1970s - particularly in the USA - a certain novelty value, by the mid-1980s to be called a feminist writer was to be announced as writing for a limited audience of like-minded readers.On the positive side, the impact of feminism can be seen even in much nonfeminist sf. Men as well as women writers are more interested in creating believable female characters; and, as a ground for "thought experiments" relating to gender, social relations and new ways of being human - topics central to feminism - sf is extremely fertile. [LT]Further reading: Future Females: A Critical Anthology (anth 1981) ed Marlene S. Barr; Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women's Speculative Fiction (1984) by Natalie M. Rosinski; Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy (anth 1985) ed Jane B. Weedman; Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985) by Rachel Blau DuPlessis; Feminist Utopias (1989) by Francis Bartkowski. FENDALL, PERCY (? -? ) UK author known solely for his sf novel Lady Ermyntrude and the Plumber: A Love Tale of MCMXX (1912). After the passage of the Great Compulsory Work Act and the suppression of the House of Lords, everybody must work to live. [JC] FENN, LIONEL Charles L. GRANT. FERGUSON, BRAD Working name of US writer Bradley Michael Ferguson (1953- ). His two Star Trek ties are Crisis on Centaurus * (1986) and A Flag Full of Stars * (1991). He has also written one independent title, The World Next Door (1990), in which a post- HOLOCAUST Earth is set as an ALTERNATE WORLD to our own. [JC] FERGUSON, HELEN Anna KAVAN. FERGUSON, NEIL (1947- ) UK writer who began publishing sf with "The Monroe Doctrine" for Interzone in 1983, and through the 1980s released several sharply conceived tales, revealing more than once a deep interest in US life.His first book, Bars of America (coll 1986), not sf, is a collection of tales and musings set in the heart of that country. His first sf novel, Putting Out (1988), presents a NEAR-FUTURE US political race in terms of the semiotics of dressing, with all the sensitivity to signs so often found in exiles, voluntary or forced. Double Helix Fall (1990), also linguistically inventive and darkly obsessed with the USA's visions of its own demise, presents - in the guise of a homage to the world and style of Philip K. DICK - an original rendering of that sense of demise, for in the USA of this novel it has become a matter of political and religious orthodoxy that to be born is to die, and that the world into which one dies is a stratified Hell. A ROBOT detective helps, in the nick of time, to loosen the death-grip. [JC] FERMAN, EDWARD L(EWIS) (1937- ) US editor, son of Joseph W. FERMAN; ELF formally took over the editorship of The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION in Jan 1966, a post in which he remained until June 1991, having previously been managing editor since Apr 1962 under Avram DAVIDSON and then his father. Under ELF's editorship FSF generally prospered: for many years it was one of only two sf magazines - ASF being the other, with both now being joined by ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE - to have maintained a regular schedule, and its circulation has remained fairly stable. FSF won the HUGO for Best Magazine five years in succession (1969-72) under ELF and, after that category was dropped, ELF won the replacement Hugo for Best Editor in 1981, 1982 and 1983. It would be fair to say that, although the magazine has lost much of its distinctive flavour of the 1950s, larger market forces and changes in the nature of the genre have had much to do with that diminution of specialness. In 1991 ELF appointed Kristine Kathryn RUSCH as editor, retaining the post of publisher.During his long stay at the helm, ELF edited various anthologies drawn from the magazine, including several volumes of the Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction series (see listing below). There were also four anniversary volumes: Twenty Years of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1970) with Robert P. MILLS, The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Special 25th Anniversary Anthology (anth 1974), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: A 30-Year Retrospective (anth 1980) ,The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 40th Anniversary Anthology (anth 1989) and The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: A 45th Anniversary Anthology (anth 1994), the last with Rusch. With Barry N. MALZBERG ELF collaborated on a notable original anthology, Final Stage (anth 1974; rev 1975), a reprint collection, Arena: Sports SF (anth 1976) and Graven Images: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction (anth 1977). [MJE/JC]Other works: Once and Future Tales from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1968); The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965 (anth 1981) with Martin H. GREENBERG; The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (anth 1986); The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (anth 1988; in 2 vols US 1989; vt The Best of Modern Horror: Twenty-Four Tales from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1989 UK) ed with Anne Devereaux Jordan.The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 15th Series (anth 1966); 16th Series (anth 1967); 17th Series (anth 1968); 18th Series (anth 1969); 19th Series (anth 1971); 20th Series (anth 1973); 22nd Series (anth 1977); 23th Series (anth 1980); 24th Series (anth 1982). FERMAN, JOSEPH W(OLFE) (1906-1974) US publisher and editor, born in Lithuania. After a long career with the magazine American Mercury, JWF became involved with The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION from its inception, was listed Aug 1954-Oct 1970 as Publisher and Dec 1964-Dec 1965 as Editor, a position to which his son, Edward L. FERMAN, succeeded him. He also founded VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION as a companion to FSF; it ran 1957-8 under the editorship of Robert P. MILLS, with a second series being published 1969-70 under the editorship of Edward L. Ferman. JWF edited an anthology of stories from Venture: No Limits (anth 1964). [MJE/PN] FERRING, DAVID David S. GARNETT. FEZANDIE, (ERNEST) CLEMENT (1865-1959) US writer and playwright based initially in New York, though he lived and travelled in the Middle East in later life, and died in Belgium. His sf novel, Through the Earth (1898), is about a transportation-tube through the planet from New York to Australia, which gives its first passenger an experience in free fall but suffers from melting at the Earth's core and must be abandoned. The sequel, A Trip to Venus, still awaits publication. It is likely that CF's early work, with its didactic bias, was appreciated by Hugo GERNSBACK, and his Dr Hackensaw series ( EDISONADE) appeared first in Gernsback's SCIENCE AND INVENTION in 43 instalments, from "The Secret of Artificial Respiration" (1921) to the novel "A Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1925), with two concluding stories published the next year in AMZ. [JC]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); HOLLOW EARTH; MATTER TRANSMISSION; SERIES. FIALKO, NATHAN (1881-? ) Soviet writer, resident in the USA, who translated his own uneven sf novel into English as The New City: A Story of the Future (1925; trans and rev 1937). It depicts first Soviet then US society with strongly DYSTOPIAN views of both. [JC] FICHMAN, FRED(ERICK) (? - ) US writer whose SETI (1990) pits its teenaged hero against both US and Soviet governments in the race to make First Contact. He does surprisingly well. [JC]See also: ALIENS. FICKS, R. SNOWDEN [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. FICTIONEERS, INC. ASTONISHING STORIES; SUPER SCIENCE STORIES. FIEDLER, LESLIE A(ARON) (1917- ) US critic whose piercing and mythopoeic views on the relationship between US culture and literature were first expressed in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), where he describes sf as a "typically Anglo-Saxon" form, although later, in Waiting for the End (coll 1964), he states that "Even in its particulars, the universe of science fiction is Jewish". He has long espoused the work of such sf writers as Samuel R. DELANY. In Dreams Awake (anth 1975) assembles material of interest, and Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided (1983) is an invigorating if sometimes eccentric examination of STAPLEDON. His fiction, like The Messengers will Come no More (1974), tends to FABULATION. [JC]See also: DEFINITIONS OF SF. FIELD, GANS T. Manly Wade WELLMAN. FIEND WITHOUT A FACE Film (1957). Amalgamated/MGM. Dir Arthur Crabtree, starring Marshall Thompson, Terence Kilburn, Kim Parker, Peter Madden, Kynaston Reeves. Screenplay Herbert J. Leder, based on "The Thought-Monster" (Weird Tales 1930) by Amelia Reynolds Long. 74 mins. B/w.This is one of the two sf/ HORROR films made by Amalgamated in the UK (the other was FIRST MAN INTO SPACE [1958], also starring Marshall Thompson) but set in North America. FWAF is much more interesting than the other, despite the absurdity of its basic premise. An elderly SCIENTIST (Reeves) accidentally creates, with his new thought-wave amplifier, a number of creatures consisting of pure energy. Invisible at first, they commit a series of murders by sucking out their victim's brains through holes made at the base of the neck; but in the final sequences, when the creatures have trapped the protagonists in a remote house, they gradually materialize as disembodied brains with trailing spinal cords and twitching tendrils. The lunatic climax has a quality of genuine nightmare, with the brains - animated in imaginative stop-motion photography by Florenz von Nordhoff and K.L. Ruppel - leaping and plopping about like demonic frogs. This is the ultimate in anti-intellectual movies. [JB/PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES. FIGGIS, N.P. (1939- ) Irish archaeologist and writer whose fourth novel, The Fourth Mode (1989), sensitively depicts a small town and the natural life surrounding it as a nuclear holocaust first threatens, then arrives. [JC] FILE 770 US FANZINE of the 1980s, ed from Los Angeles by Mike Glyer, bimonthly for most of its life. A newsletter covering FANDOM, with emphasis on North America, it was begun when the previous US "newszine" (fanzine devoted to items of news), Karass, ed Linda Bushyager, folded. The focus of F770, much of whose contents are written in Glyer's no-nonsense style, is convention news and reports. It won HUGOS for Best Fanzine in 1984, 1985 and 1989, and Glyer won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 1984, 1986 and 1988. [RH] FILM CINEMA. FINAL COUNTDOWN, THE Film (1980). Bryna Company/United Artists. Dir Don Taylor, starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, James Farentino. Screenplay David Ambrose, Gerry DAVIS, Thomas Hunter, Peter Powell, based on a story by Hunter, Powell, Ambrose. 105 mins. Colour.An aircraft carrier on manoeuvres off Hawaii in 1980 is caught in a strange storm which turns out to be a time-warp. The vessel is deposited in the same spot in 1941, just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Action is eschewed for interminable ethical debate about altering history, as the captain (Douglas) agonizes whether or not to shoot down the Japanese planes which will shortly bomb the US naval base; a second time-warp renders decision unnecessary. The film is wholly pointless, ill acted, and a complete waste of a perfectly good ship, the Nimitz, which the US Navy had allowed the production company (Kirk Douglas and family) to use. [PN] FINAL PROGRAMME, THE (vt The Last Days of Man on Earth) Film (1973). Goodtimes Enterprises/Gladiole Films/MGM-EMI. Dir Robert Fuest, starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre, Sterling Hayden, Harry Andrews, Hugh Griffith, Julie Ege, Patrick Magee, Derrick O'Connor. Screenplay Fuest, based on The Final Programme (1968) by Michael MOORCOCK. 89 mins. Colour.In this first film to feature Moorcock's polymorph protagonist, Jerry Cornelius, style triumphs over content. Originally a set-designer, Fuest is best known for The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), an extravagantly theatrical horror-film spoof, and for the many episodes that he directed of The AVENGERS . TFP looks impressive, but not much of Moorcock's creation remains. Cornelius's father has died, leaving a hidden microfilm on which is the final (computer) programme of the title. Those involved in the hunt for the film include Jerry (Finch), his evil brother (O'Connor), and the awesome Miss Brunner (Runacre), who has a tendency to consume her lovers, bones and all. The Moorcock original was not as strong as the other three books of his Jerry Cornelius tetralogy, but none the less was sophisticated in its ironies, which Fuest here reduces (literally in one case) to a series of knowing winks. When Moorcock defines his characters in terms of their personal style, this is often a form of criticism; for Fuest, by contrast, strong style is apparently to be admired. The apotheosis of the book is rendered farcical in the film, which substitutes a grinning Neanderthal for Moorcock's original hermaphroditic MESSIAH. [PN/JB] FINCH, SHEILA (ROSEMARY) (1935- ) UK-born writer, in the USA from 1962 or earlier, who began publishing sf with "The Confession of Melakos" for Sou-wester in 1977. Her first novel, Infinity's Web (1985), rather confusedly describes the lives of five versions of one protagonist who live in various ALTERNATE WORLDS, and who gradually gain a sense of the mutual web they inhabit. Though far more devoted to generic pleasures than Joanna RUSS in THE FEMALE MAN (1975), whose structure is superificially similar, the novel still generates a clear and telling FEMINIST perspective. Her professional training in linguistics permeates her second novel, Triad (1986), another very full story, involving a woman-run Earth government, a female mission to a planet where several ALIEN races seem to congregate, and pirates. She is now, perhaps unfairly, best known for the Shaper Exile sequence - The Garden of the Shaped (1987), Shaper's Legacy (1989) and Shaping the Dawn (1989) - as the first volume at least of this PLANETARY ROMANCE is awkwardly written, dumping three separate genetic versions of human stock upon a new planet, and sorting them out in terms of an unconvincing biological determinism. The second volume is more toughly argued, but the third moves too easily into the plot arabesques common to this subgenre. SF is still (1992) in the wings, but gives the impression she is capable of stepping into full view at any time. [JC]See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING. FIN DU MONDE, LA (vt The End of the World) Film (1931). L'Ecran d'Art. Dir Abel Gance, starring Gance, Victor Francen, Colette Darfeuil, Sylvie Grenade, Jeanne Brindeau, Samson Fainsilber. Screenplay Gance, suggested by a story by Camille FLAMMARION. 105 mins, cut to 91 mins, cut to 54 mins. B/w.This tells of a comet's approach to Earth and of the upheavals (natural and cultural) that ensue. There are orgies, and the rise of a totalitarian leader (Francen), obviously approved by the director, who would soon prove sympathetic to fascism. As with most of Gance's films, which were usually independently produced, it took many years to complete. LFDM was made as a silent film, but sound effects were later added by the producers, who sacked Gance and cut the film's length. (Gance was still working on one version in 1949.) A shortened 54min English version, repudiated by Gance, was released in 1934; it was supervised by V. Ivanoff and the script was adapted by H.S. Kraft. The film is extravagant, and fits one description of Gance's work as hovering "between the ludicrous and the majestic"; a more unkind critic might see it as somewhere between the grandiose and the banal. [PN/JB] FINE, STEPHEN (1949- ) US author whose first novel, Molly Dear: The Autobiography of an Android, or How I Came to my Senses, Was Repaired, Escaped my Master, and Was Educated in the Ways of the World (1988), rewrites Daniel DEFOE's Moll Flanders (1722) as the memoirs of a 21st-century ANDROID to satirical effect. Her innocence - assisted by memory wipes - resembles that of VOLTAIRE's Candide, or almost any of John T. SLADEK's child ROBOTS in a cruel world. Some of the points about Molly's legal enslavement are sharply made. [JC] FINE PRESSES SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS. FINLAND Sf in Finland, now over a century old, has been diverse, with few clear-cut lines of development. The earliest story was the serial "Muistelmia matkaltani Ruskealan pappilaan uuden vuoden aikoina vuonna 1983" ["Memoirs of My Trip to the Vicarage of Ruskeala around New Year 1983"] (1883, in the newspaper Aura) by Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson. Apart from a few children's stories, early Finnish sf took the form of future, sometimes socialist, UTOPIAS. The Moon was reached by an icy ball in "Matka kuuhun" ["Voyage to the Moon"] (1887) by Tyko Hagman, but the first true sf was the novella "Tahtien tarhoissa" ["Among the Stars"] (1912) by Arvid Lydecken, which was about Helsinki in AD2140, a Martian attack, a voyage to Mars and the beginning of peaceful coexistence on Earth after Mars has been destroyed by impacting asteroids.Fear of Bolshevism during WWI produced several imaginary- WAR novels, the first being the excellent Ylos helvetista ["Up from Hell"] (1917) by Konrad Lehtimaki. In Suur-Isanmaa ["The Great Fatherland"] (1918) by Kapteeni Ter-s, Finland defeats Russia, forces the UK's surrender and becomes a superpower. Kohtalon kolmas hetki ["Fate's Third Moment"] (1926) by Aarno Karimo tells about a war in 1967-8 between Finland and the Soviet Union, which nation (in a defence union with the Mongols) is totally devastated by strange Finnish inventions. A typical hero of the period would be a scientist-inventor. The most curious of these "engineer novels" is Neljannen ulottuvuuden mies ["Man of the Fourth Dimension"] (1919) by H.R. Halli, in which a new chemical substance enables its users to see and walk through solid objects. The best book of this period, Viimeisella hetkella ["At the Last Moment"] (1922), also by Halli, creates a daring time perspective into Earth's distant future.There were fewer sf books in the 1930s. Among the more notable are The Diamondking of Sahara (1935), written in English by Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa, and Undred fran krateron ["The Wonder of Crater Island"] (1939), written in Swedish by Ole Eklund. There were 30 sf books published in the 1940s. The most popular were the Atorox series by Outsider (pseudonym of Aarne Haapakoski) whose eponymous character was a ROBOT: Atorox, ihmisten valtias ["Atorox, Lord of Humans"] (1947), Atorox kuussa ["Atorox on the Moon"] (1947), Atorox Marsissa ["Atorox on Mars"] (1947), Atorox Venuksessa ["Atorox on Venus"] (1947), Atorox Merkuriuksessa ["Atorox on Mercury"] (1948) and Atoroxin paluu v. 2948 ["The Return of Atorox in AD2948"] (1948). The most remarkable book of the period, however, was Volter Kilpi's Gulliverin matka Fantomimian mantereelle ["Gulliver's Travel to the Continent of Fantomimia"] (1944), where Gulliver leaves the 18th century for the 20th.The term"science fiction" itself came to Finland in 1953 with translations of US books, and the 1950s saw growing enthusiasm for sf; the publisher Otava held a competition, "Adventures in the World of Technology", whose winner was Armas J. Pulla with Lentavalautanen sieppasi pojat ["The Boys Were Snatched by a Flying Saucer"] (1954), in which antlike Martians intend to invade Earth. Other books of the decade were juvenile adventures. Sf writers of the 1950s, each with several books, include Osmo Ilmari and Antero Harju, and Ralf Parland (who wrote in Swedish).The 1960s were poor years for Finnish sf. The only notable novel of the period was Paikka nimelta Plaston ["A Place Called Plaston"] (1968) by Erkki Ahonen, set on a planet whose devolved inhabitants live in herds, controlled by COMPUTERS. Ahonen's subsequent books, Tietokonelapsi ["The Computer Child"] (1972), about a human embryo's excised brain interfaced with a computer, and Syva matka ["Deep Voyage"] (1976), about the evolution of consciousness on another planet, are Finland's most important sf novels. Further books worth mentioning from the 1970s are: Viimeinen uutinen ["The Last News"] (1970) by Risto Kavanne, about NEAR-FUTURE power politics; Rosterna i den sena timmen ["Voices in the Late Hours"] (1971) by Bo Carpelan, about the feelings of people under the threat of nuclear war; and Aurinkotuuli ["Wind from the Sun"] (1975) by Kullervo Kukkasjarvi (1938- ).The first Finnish sf magazine, Spin, began as a FANZINE in 1977. It was followed by Aikakone ["Time Machine"] (1981), Portti ["The Gate"] (1982), Tahtivaeltaja ["Star Wanderer"] (1982) and Ikaros (1986). Besides translations, these magazines publish short fiction by Finnish writers, who before had had to be content with occasional publication in mainstream periodicals. Aikakone has grown to the point that it singlehandedly supports its own fandom and sf milieu, with new young authors appearing.Of these Portti is the largest, followed by Tahtivaeltaja and then by Aikakone.Recent Finnish sf is represented by Auruksen tapaus ["The Case of Aurus"] (1980) by Jukka Pakkanen, a vision of the future; Amos ja saarelaiset ["Amos and the Island People"] (1987) by the well known MAINSTREAM writer Hannu Salama, telling in a stylistically compact way of the world after a nuclear WAR; Katajanukke ["The Juniper Doll"] (1988), a first novel by Pekka Virtanen; and Messias ["Messiah"] (1989) by Kari Nenonen, the story of Christ's cloning from the Shroud of Turin and of the consequences. The anthologies Jainen vaeltaja ["The Ice Wanderer"] (anth 1986), Atoroxin perilliset ["The Heirs of Atorox"] (anth 1988) and Tahtipuu ["Startree"] (anth 1990) contain mainly short stories by new Finnish writers - among the best of whom are Johanna Sinisalo, Ari Tervonen and Eeva-Liisa Tenhunen - selected from magazines and writing competitions. The annual Finnish award for best short story is the Atorox . AWARD, whose winners up to 1993 included four wins by Johanna Sinisalo. Finnish FANDOM is quite active; there have been four national conventions, known as "Finncons", all in Helsinki, held in 1986, 1989, 1991 and 1993.Tales from Finnish mythology, as collected from legends and ballads to form the epic poem Kalevala from 1828 to 1849, have not only nourished Finnish writers - as in Pekka Virtanen's "Kanavat" ["Canals"] (1985), Veikko Rekunen's "Viimeinen laulaja" ["The Last Singer"] (1985) and Ernst Lampen's Taivaallisia tarinoita ["Heavenly Stories"] (coll 1918) - but have also influenced the works of writers abroad, as for example Emil PETAJA's four-novel Kalevala sequence - Saga of Lost Earths (1966), The Star Mill (1966), The Stolen Sun (1967) and Tramontane (1967) - as well as his The Time Twister (1968) and, by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Fletcher PRATT, Wall of Serpents (1953-4; 1960). [JI]See also: SCANDINAVIA. FINLAY, VIRGIL (WARDEN) (1914-1971) US illustrator. VF worked in both colour and black-and-white, but is best known for the latter, where his unique, painstaking stippling gained him fame although, because of the slow process involved, not fortune. Nonetheless he was prolific. His earliest work was an interior illustration for Weird Tales in 1935. Though it was in black-and-white interior work that he excelled - several thousand pieces - he also painted many covers, including 16 for Weird Tales and 24 for Famous Fantastic Mysteries. His work appeared also in A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, Fantastic Novels, Fantastic Story Quarterly and about 27 other sf/fantasy magazines. He often added sparkling bubbles to his illustrations, partly as a decorative device and partly to modestly conceal parts of naked women. He was stronger in fantasy than sf, excelling (it was a common paradox) in the two extremes of the glamorous and the macabre, both meticulously executed. His early work was more abstractly stylized than the later, and suggested a toughness which later became smoothed under an expert commercial veneer. Possibly the greatest craftsman in the history of sf ILLUSTRATION, VF revolutionized its quality. The HUGO system arrived a little late for VF; though he was nominated 7 times, he won only once, in the very first year, 1953 - the only award ever given for Best Interior Illustration. He had only small success doing book covers, mostly 1949-58, which his style did not really suit. Sadly, the collapse in SF-MAGAZINE publishing in the mid-1950s - with the surviving magazines being DIGESTS rather than PULP MAGAZINES and so having fewer illustrations - forced VF away from sf as his main market, and through the late 1950s and the 1960s he worked largely on astrological illustrations. Many portfolios and books of his work have been published, the first being A Portfolio of Illustrations by Virgil Finlay (coll 1941) published by Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Books include Virgil Finlay (1971) ed Donald M. GRANT, and The Book of Virgil Finlay (1975) and Virgil Finlay Remembered (1981) ed Gerry de la Ree (1924 -1993), these latter being 2 out of 12 books of and about Finlay's art ed de la Ree. [JG/PN]See also: COMICS; FANTASY; SEX; SPACESHIPS. FINN, RALPH L(ESLIE) (1912- ) UK novelist and journalist who published widely. Of some sf interest are three novels based on the time theories of J.W. DUNNE: The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet (1948), Twenty-Seven Stairs (1949) and Time Marches Sideways (1950), the latter a love story set in London. Captive on the Flying Saucers (c1950) and Freaks against Supermen (c1951), both conventional sf stories, gain some interest from their mild erotic content. [JC]See also: TIME TRAVEL. FINNEY, CHARLES G(RANDISON) (1905-1984) US newspaperman and writer, based in Arizona, who spent the years 1927-9 with the US infantry in Tientsin, China; an oriental influence pervades most of his work. His novels and stories, though FANTASY rather than sf, have been influential throughout the field, especially his famous The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), filmed insensitively as The Seven Faces of Dr Lao (1963). CGF's work was a strong influence on Ray BRADBURY in particular, as the latter's anthology, The Circus of Dr Lao and Other Improbable Stories (anth 1956), demonstrates. The novel depicts the effect upon a small Arizona town of Dr Lao's circus, which is full of mythical beasts and demigods, all of whom actually live within his tents: they are simultaneously pathetic and awe-inspiring, and the townspeople soon find themselves acquiring unwanted self-knowledge as they confront the caged GODS. The erotic intensity of these confrontations is remarkable. The Magician out of Manchuria (1976 UK) - which first appeared under that title in The Unholy City (omni 1968) along with a revised version of The Unholy City (1937) - is set in China, and agreeably lightens the message of Lao. The Unholy City itself is a somewhat unwieldy allegory. The Ghosts of Manacle (coll 1964) assembles much of CGF's short fiction. [JC]Other works: Past the End of the Pavement (1939), associational.See also: MYTHOLOGY. FINNEY, JACK Working name of US author Walter Braden Finney (1911- ), whose career began when he was 35; he published his first work in the genre, "Such Interesting Neighbors" for COLLIER'S WEEKLY, in 1951. Although he is as well known for sf as for anything else, he did not specialize in the field, adapting his highly professional skills to mysteries and general fiction as well. Stories from his first years as a writer of sf can be found in The Third Level (coll 1957; vt The Clock of Time 1958 UK) and later ones in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime: Fantasy and Time Stories (coll 1963) - both asembled as About Time: Twelve Stories (omni 1986) - and Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories (coll 1983). Many are evocative tales of escape from an ugly present into a tranquil past, or into a PARALLEL WORLD, or wistful variants of the theme when the escape fails. His best-known work is The Body Snatchers (1955; vt Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1973; rev 1978), twice filmed as INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS: in 1956 by Don Siegel and in 1978 by Philip Kaufman. The book - perhaps less plausibly than the film versions-horrifyingly depicts the INVASION of a small town by interstellar spores that duplicate human beings, reducing them to dust in the process. The menacing spore-people who remain symbolize, it has been argued, the loss of freedom in a 1950s USA obsessed by the problems of "conformism". JF's further books were smoothly told, more involving, perhaps less pertinent. The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1960 Saturday Evening Post; exp 1968) is a PARALLEL-WORLDS novel. Time and Again (1970) sets a time traveller in the New York of 1882, which is meticulously evoked. Marion's Wall (1973) movingly displaces the ghost of a 1926 film star into the present day. Generally, in a JF story, sf or fantasy devices open the door into new worlds and are then forgotten. The worlds thus made available are, all the same, engrossing. [JC]Other works: Both The Woodrow Wilson Dime and Marion's Wall appear with The Night People (1977) in 3 by Finney (omni 1987).See also: TIME TRAVEL; UTOPIAS. FIREBALL XL5 UK tv series (1962-3). AP Films for ATV/ITC. Created by Gerry and Sylvia ANDERSON; prod Gerry Anderson. Dirs included Alan Pattillo, John Kelly, Bill Harris. Writers included the Andersons, Alan Fennell, Anthony Marriott, Dennis Spooner. 1 full season and 1 part season. 39 25min episodes. B/w.This was the second of the Andersons' "SuperMarionation" animated-puppet sf series for children, the first being SUPERCAR and the third being STINGRAY; it was the last made in black-and-white and the first to be networked in full in the USA (on NBC). Steve Zodiac is a space pilot, part of World Space Fleet (based in the Pacific Ocean); his spacecraft XL5 patrols other star systems. This is a true SPACE OPERA, in its way a predecessor of STAR TREK. Sidekicks include Venus, a glamorous blonde space doctor, Professor Mat Matic, a Genius, and Robert the Robot. Stories involved, inter alia, space pirates, a glass-surfaced planet and Ice Men. Planetary transport was by jetmobile. Derek Meddings's special effects, mostly achieved through use of clever models, are good. [PN] FIREFOX Film (1982). Warner Bros. Dir Clint Eastwood, starring Eastwood, Freddie Jones, Nigel Hawthorne, Warren Clarke. Screenplay Alex Lasker, Wendell Wellman, based on Firefox (1977) by Craig THOMAS. 136 mins. Colour.The sf aspect of the film is a new Russian fighter, the MIG 31 or "Firefox", which can fly at Mach-5 and operates through electronic translation of the pilot's brain patterns (thought control). Eastwood is the US pilot smuggled into the USSR to steal it and fly it out. The movie is split in two, the difficult voyage in disguise to the Soviet air base being tense and well accomplished, the flight back out (with a STAR WARS-style dogfight) merely silly, especially since the much-discussed thought control turns out to have no real plot function at all. The film never even considers that such a raid might precipitate WWIII. [PN] FIRE IN THE SKY Film (1993). Paramount. Dir Robert Lieberman, screenplay Tracy Torme based on The Walton Experience by Travis Walton, starring D.B. Sweeney, Robert Patrick, Craig Sheffer and James Garner. 109 mins. Colour.Based on a supposedly non-fictional account of the abduction by aliens of one member of a six-man forest-clearing team in Arizona, the film concentrates on local suspicions that the other five may have murdered him, and the inability of anyone to believe their fantastic story. When the kidnapped man is found a week later, naked and traumatised, it is now generally believed that a hoax has taken place. A lie-detector test proves inconclusive. However, by showing staccato flash-back memories of the partly-amnesiac victim, the film removes any ambiguity: aliens were indeed involved, we are given to believe. The flash-back scenes set on the alien spacecraft are well achieved, and in their way as good as those in COMMUNION (1989), an earlier abduction movie of which this is a sort of blue-collar reprise. The film's low-key documentary style gives an impression of honesty, despite the implausibility of the basic premise. [PN] FIRESTARTER Film (1984). Universal. Dir Mark L. Lester, starring David Keith, Drew Barrymore, Freddie Jones, Heather Locklear, Martin Sheen, George C. Scott. Screenplay Stanley Mann, based on Firestarter (1980) by Stephen KING. 114 mins. Colour.The novel is not one of King's best, but it hardly deserved this messy adaptation. A young girl, Charlie (Barrymore), has pyrotic powers and can start fires by mental concentration alone. Naturally, a CIA-like organization ("the Shop") wishes to exploit her powers as a new WEAPON, and just as naturally she incinerates them in a final (rather small) holocaust. Scott plays the evil Native-American assassin who wishes to absorb Charlie's powers. The film is pure CLICHE from beginning to end, and not very competent at that level. Far superior in the teenage PSI POWERS line is the very similar The FURY (1978) and, of course, CARRIE (1976), both dir Brian De Palma, and the latter also based on a King novel. [PN] FIRST COMICS COMICS. FIRST CONTACT COMMUNICATIONS. FIRST FANDOM AWARDS AWARDS. FIRST MAN INTO SPACE Film (1958). Amalgamated/MGM. Dir Robert Day, starring Marshall Thompson, Marla Landi, Robert Ayres, Bill Edwards. Screenplay John C. Cooper, Lance Z. Hargreaves, from "Satellite of Blood" by Wyott Ordung. 77 mins. B/w.This is the second of two sf films made by Amalgamated in the UK that pretend to be set in the USA (the other was FIEND WITHOUT A FACE [1957]). FMIS seems to imitate The QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955; vt The Creeping Unknown): a test pilot ejects from his high-flying aeroplane and returns to Earth enveloped in a repulsive, crusty substance that turns him into an inhuman, blood-drinking monster (the blood giving him the oxygen he needs! ). As in the Quatermass film, there are moments of pathos, but FMIS is generally derivative and routine. Released around the time of the first orbital satellites, FMIS, with its deceptive title, must have lured audiences expecting something scientific and quasidocumentary; indeed, despite its lurid content, it is soberly and stiffly directed. [JB/PN] FIRST MEN IN THE MOON Film (1964). Columbia. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir Nathan Juran, starring Edward Judd, Martha Hyer, Lionel Jeffries. Screenplay Nigel KNEALE, Jan Read, from THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901) by H.G. WELLS. 107 mins, cut to 103 mins. Colour.This watered-down version of Wells's classic novel is for the most part low farce, with too much random slaughtering of Selenite aliens, but still contrives to be entertaining. An eccentric Victorian inventor who has developed an ANTIGRAVITY material flies to the Moon in a spherical "spaceship". He and his companions are captured by insect-like Moon people but eventually escape, inadvertently leaving behind cold-germs which destroy the Moon's population. Ray HARRYHAUSEN's Moon creatures are rather good, as are the sets.A previous version of FMITM was made in 1919 by British Gaumont, dir J.V. Leigh. [JB/PN] FIRST ROCKETS When early writers wanted their characters to explore space, the idea of rockets just never came up. Even Jules Verne had his heroes blasted out of giant cannons, the sudden acceleration of which would have flattened them into jelly.It was the Russian scientist and science fiction writer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who first realized how space flight would actually work. The year was 1883 and Tsiolkovsky was 26 years old when he first proposed the radical idea that jet propulsion could send a vehicle into space.Tsiolkovsky also came up with the concept of liquid propulsion. Until then, rockets had been filled with gunpowder. He even imagined the multiple stages of a rocket's liftoff.Way ahead of his time, Tsiolkovsky’s SF work is virtuallyunknown today. But his importance to the history of spacetravel - and to science fiction - is clear. FIRTH, N. WESLEY Working name of UK writer Norman Firth (1920-1949), who began his career during WWII writing pulp Westerns and thrillers. He wrote stories variously as Rice Ackman, Earl Ellison, Leslie Halward and perhaps other names; his first sf publication was almost certainly "Obscene Parade" (1946 Weird Story Magazine). His first novel, Terror Strikes (1946 chap), is of some interest through its extremely close resemblance to H.G. WELLS's The Invisible Man (1897). Spawn of the Vampire (1946 chap) is a hastily concocted horror tale. NF wrote the entire contents of FUTURISTIC STORIES (1946) and STRANGE ADVENTURES (1946-7). He was a writer of potential worth, but died (of TB) at the age of 29 before proving it. [SH] FISCHER, LEONARD (?1903-?1974) Canadian writer whose Let Out the Beast (1950) is a post- HOLOCAUST-reversion-to-savagery book in which it is the protagonist who - unusually - becomes the feared enemy of those engaged in trying to rebuild civilization. [JC] FISH, LEONARD G. (1923? - ) UK author of some short fiction under his own name and as by David Campbell, and of several minor sf adventures: Planet War (1952) as by Fysh, After the Atom (1953) as by Victor LA SALLE, and Beyond the Solar System (1954) as by Claude Haley. [SH] FISHER, JAMES P. (? - ) US writer whose sf novel The Great Brain Robbery (1970) is a rather lightweight adventure in which an ALIEN tries to steal a student's unusual brain. [JC] FISHER, LOU (1940- ) US writer. During a 20 year career writing IBM computer manuals, he began publishing sf with "Triggerman" for Gal in 1973. His first novel, Sunstop 8 (1978), is a SPACE OPERA; his second, The Blue Ice Pilot (1986), features a space war made possible by developments in CRYONICS. [JC] FISHER, VARDIS (ALVERO) (1895-1968) US writer, raised in a Mormon family; his best-known single novel, Children of God (1939), is about the Mormons. His Testament of Man sequence covers the whole of human history, extending into many volumes the basic strategy which shapes several novels by F. Britten AUSTIN, the 6 vols of Johannes V. JENSEN's The Long Journey (1922-4) and other early-20th-century celebrations of the drama of EVOLUTION. Of sf interest in the Testament are the first 5 titles, which deal with prehistory: Darkness and the Deep (1943), The Golden Rooms (1944), Intimations of Eve (1946), Adam and the Serpent (1947) and The Divine Passion (1948), which comprise a formidable attempt at sustained anthropological sf. [JC]See also: ADAM AND EVE; ORIGIN OF MAN. FISK, NICHOLAS Pseudonym of UK author David Higginbottom (1923- ), who writes exclusively for children. His first sf tale was Space Hostages (1967), in which his tastes for HARD-SF backgrounds and realistically flawed protagonists were competently expressed. The former reaches full expression in tales like Trillions (1971) and Antigrav (1978). A Rag, a Bone, and a Hank of Hair (1980), on the other hand, gravely and movingly concentrates on its emotionally torn protagonist, a young genius in an arid far-future DYSTOPIA commanded to observe a small family of reconstructed "primitives", who have been drugged into repeating the same fake 1940 day over and over again, so that he may garner experimental data about raw humans. In the end, both family and protagonist are killed by the masters of the terrible world. NF is a smooth writer, but the world he envisages - as demonstrated in A Hole in the Head (1991), a harrowing tale of the Earth at the brink of ecological catastrophe - is fraught. [JC]Other works: Grinny (1973); High Way Home (1973); Little Green Spacemen (1974 chap); The Witches of Wimmering (1976); Wheelie in the Stars (1976 chap); Time Trap (1976); Escape from Splatterbang (1978 chap; vt Flamers 1979 chap); Monster Maker (1979); the Starstormers sequence, comprising Starstormers (1980), Sunburst (1980), Catfang (1981), Evil Eye (1982) and Volcano (1983); Robot Revolt (1981); Sweets from a Stranger (coll 1982); On the Flip Side (1983); You Remember Me! (1984); Dark Sun, Bright Sun (1986); Living Fire (coll 1987); Mindbenders (1987); Backlash (1988); The Talking Car (1988 chap); The Telly is Watching You (1989); The Worm Charmers (1989); The Back-Yard War (1990 chap); The Model Village (1990); Extraterrestrial Tales (omni 1991) assembling Space Hostages, Trillions and On the Flip Side; Pig Ignorant (1991); The Puffin Book of Science Fiction (anth 1993).See also: CHILDREN'S SF; RADIO. FISKE, TARLETON [s] Robert BLOCH. FITZGERALD, HUGH L. Frank BAUM. FITZGERALD, WILLIAM [s] Murray LEINSTER. FITZGIBBON, (ROBERT LOUIS) CONSTANTINE (LEE-DILLON) (1919-1983) US writer of politically oriented fiction and other works who became a naturalized Irish citizen. His first sf novel, The Iron Hoop (1949), describes an occupied city in WWIII. When the Kissing Had to Stop (1960) depicts in Anglophobe terms the self-destruction of a UK dominated by a Communist-inspired government. Less known but more remarkable, The Golden Age (1975) treats the post- HOLOCAUST recuperation of the UK in terms of the myth of Orpheus. [JC]Other works: The Rat Report (1980). FITZ-GIBBON, RALPH EDGERTON (c1904- ) US writer, long active as a journalist. His sf novel, The Man with Two Bodies (1952), offers parapsychological explanations for the mysteries suggested by the title. [JC] FIVE Film (1951). Columbia. Prod, written, dir Arch Oboler, starring Susan Douglas, William Phipps, James Anderson, Charles Lampkin, Earl Lee. 93 mins, cut to 89 mins (UK). B/w.The first "after the bomb" film, F concerns five US survivors - a mountaineer, a pregnant girl, a token Black, a cashier and an adventurer. This is a gloomy art film with low-budget, grainy photography, a scientifically bogus explanation for the five's survival, much talking, a racial murder and two deaths from radiation, but the theme itself retains some power. Oboler had worked extensively in radio before entering the film industry in 1945 with Strange Holiday and Bewitched, both based on his own radio plays. F is basically a sermon against the prejudices and insanities that may lead to atomic war. [JB/PN] FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. FIXUP A term first used by A.E. VAN VOGT to describe a book made up of previously published stories fitted together - usually with the addition of newly written or published cementing material - so that they read as a novel. Aware that fixups are immensely more common in GENRE SF than in any other literature in the world, we borrowed the term for the 1979 edition of this encyclopedia, and continue to use it now; an example is van Vogt's own THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (fixup 1951). We do, however, recognize that it is not always an easy description to apply with accuracy. It is, for instance, sometimes impossible to know whether or not a series of connected stories has in fact been extracted from an already-written book, which for some would make it impossible to describe that book as a fixup; some readers and authors, in other words, feel that the term can be applied only to novels assembled from previously existing work.We disagree. A book which is written so as to be broken up for prior magazine publication may well, in our view, constitute a perfectly legitimate example of the form, though we do recognize that when we call such a text a fixup we are making a critical judgment as to the internal nature - the feel - of that text. We should perhaps emphasize, therefore, that the term is not, for us, derogatory. In fact, the fixup form may arguably be ideal for tales of epic sweep through time and space. It is perhaps no accident that Robert A HEINLEIN's seminal GENERATION-STARSHIP tale, "Universe" (1941), ultimately became part of Orphans of the Sky (fixup 1963 UK). [JC] FLACKES, B Working name of Irish writer William David Flackes (1921-1993), who spent much of his career as a journalist reporting on Irish matters; he won an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1981. His sf was a sideline, and not of much interest. It includes (almost certainly) 2 novels as by Clem Macartney: Ten Years of Oblivion (1951) and Dark Side of Venus (1951). Under his own name, he wrote Duel in Nightmare Worlds (1952). [JC] FLAGG, FRANCIS Pseudonym of US writer George Henry Weiss (?1898-1946), who appeared in Weird Tales and then began publishing sf with "The Machine Man of Ardathia" for AMZ in 1927. He published 20 or so typical pulp-sf stories over the next decade, some of his later work being in collaboration with Forrest J. ACKERMAN. He was a comparatively careful writer. In his posthumously published sf tale, The Night People (1947 chap), an escaped convict takes a drug-induced trip to another planet. [JC]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; CANADA. FLAMMARION, (NICHOLAS) CAMILLE (1842-1925) French astronomer and writer. One of the first major popularizers of ASTRONOMY, he took great delight in the flights of imagination to which his studies in COSMOLOGY inspired him. In 1858, the year he entered the Paris Observatory as a student, he wrote an unpublished scientific romance, Voyage extatique aux reegions lunaires, correspondence d'un philosophe adolescent. His two major fascinations were the possibilities of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS and of life after death, and these interests are reflected by his earliest major works: La pluralite des mondes habites ["The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds"] (1862) and Les habitants de l'autre monde ["The Inhabitants of the Other World"] (1862), the latter being "revelations" transmitted by the medium Mlle Huet. His most important work in the popularization of science was Astronomie populaire (1880; trans as Popular Astronomy 1894). He dramatized ideas from his earlier nonfiction book Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes reels (1864; trans as Real and Imaginary Worlds 1865 US) in three of his Recits de l'infini (coll 1872; trans S.R. Crocker as Stories of Infinity 1874 US): "The History of a Comet", "Lumen" and "In Infinity". The second, consisting of a series of dialogues between a man and a disembodied spirit which is free to roam the Universe at will, includes observations about the implications of the finite velocity of light and many images of otherworldly life adapted to ALIEN circumstances. These stories were revised and expanded for separate publication as Lumen (1887; trans A.M. and R.M., with some new material, 1897 US). Notions taken from these dialogues were embodied in the REINCARNATION romances Stella (1877 France) and Uranie (1889; trans Mary Serrano as Uranie 1890 US; new trans Augusta Rice Stetson as Urania 1891 US). CF's boldest SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, however, is La fin du monde (1893-4; trans anon as Omega: The Last Days of the World 1897 US), an epic of the future. Although it is as much essay as story, this is a notable work, akin to H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895) and William Hope HODGSON's The House on the Borderland (1908) in presenting a striking vision of the END OF THE WORLD. CF's scientific reputation was injured by his passionate interest in Spiritualism (in later life he was an intimate of Arthur Conan DOYLE), but his was a major contribution to the popularization of science and to the literature of the scientific imagination. [BS]See also: ESCHATOLOGY; EVOLUTION; FAR FUTURE; FASTER THAN LIGHT; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; MARS; RELIGION; STARS; SUN. FLASH GORDON 1. US COMIC strip created by artist Alex RAYMOND for King Features Syndicate. FG appeared in 1934, at first in Sunday, later in daily newspapers. Its elaborately shaded style and exotic storyline made it one of the most influential sf strips. It was taken over in 1944 by Austin Briggs, then in 1948 by Mac Raboy, and since then has been drawn by Dan Barry (with contributions from artists Harvey Kurtzman and Wally WOOD and writer Harry HARRISON) and Al Williamson, and more recently written by Bruce Jones and illustrated by Gray MORROW. Various episodes have been released in comic-book form - including a 9-part series from DC COMICS written and drawn by Dan Jurgens (1988) - and also in book form. It continues today.The scenario of FG is archetypal SPACE OPERA. Most episodes feature Flash locked in combat with the villain, Ming the Merciless of the planet Mongo. Flash's perpetual fiancee, Dale Arden, and the mad SCIENTIST Hans Zarkov play prominent roles. (In later episodes Zarkov's craziness was played down and he became a straightforward sidekick to Flash.) The decor shifts between the futuristic ( DEATH RAYS, rocketships) and the archaic (dinosaurs, jungles, swordplay) with a fine contempt for plausibility, rather in the manner of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's romances. Although begun quite cynically in conscious opposition to the earlier BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, FG quickly developed its own individuality, emphasizing a romantic baroque against the cool technological classicism of its predecessor, to which it is artistically very much superior.The strip was widely syndicated in Europe. When, during WWII, the arrival of various episodes was delayed, the strip was often written and drawn by Europeans. One such writer was Federico Fellini (1920- ).The FG comic strip has had many repercussions in other media. It led to a popular radio serial, to a short-lived pulp magazine ( FLASH GORDON STRANGE ADVENTURE MAGAZINE), and in the late 1930s to several film serials starring Buster Crabbe; later came a tv series and a film (see below). A full-length film parody, FLESH GORDON, appeared in 1974.The radio serial exactly paralleled the Sunday comic strip, so you could see in the paper the monsters you'd heard on the radio.An early FG novel was Flash Gordon in the Caverns of Mongo (1937) by Raymond. A paperback series of five FG short novels, based on the original strips, with Alex Raymond credited, consisted of Flash Gordon 1: The Lion Men of Mongo * (1974), Flash Gordon 2: The Plague of Sound * (1974), Flash Gordon 3: The Space Circus * (1974), Flash Gordon 4: The Time Trap of Ming XIII * (1974) and Flash Gordon 5: The Witch Queen of Mongo * (1974). The first four were "adapted by Con Steffanson", a house name; #1-#3 were the work of Ron GOULART; #4 was by Carson Bingham (Bruce Bingham CASSIDAY) and #5, also by Bingham, was published under his name.2. Serial film. 13 2-reel episodes (1936). Universal. Dir Frederick Stephani, starring Buster Crabbe, Jean Rogers, Charles Middleton, Frank Shannon, Priscilla Lawson. Screenplay Stephani, George Plympton, Basil Dickey, Ella O'Neill, based on the comic strip. B/w.The film FG was the nearest thing to PULP-MAGAZINE space opera to appear on the screen during the 1930s. Flash, Dale and Zarkov go to the planet Mongo in Zarkov's backyard-built spaceship to find the cause of an outbreak of volcanic activity on Earth. Ming the Merciless (a wonderfully hammy performance from Middleton) is behind it all and plans to invade Earth. Our heroes spend the next 12 episodes surviving various exotic hazards before outwitting Ming in the final reel. Though more lavish than the average serial (the budget was a record $350,000), FG has the cheap appearance of most: unconvincing special effects, sets and costumes borrowed from a variety of other films, and plenty of stock footage. However, it remains great fun, romantic and fantastical. Ill edited versions of the first and second halves were released theatrically as Spaceship to the Unknown (1936) (97 mins) and Perils from the Planet Mongo (1936) (91 mins).The follow-up was Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), dirs Ford Beebe, Robert F. Hill, with the same leading actors - Ming is back again - and Beatrice Roberts as the evil queen who turns humans to "clay people". 15 two-reel episodes. Screenplay Ray Trampe, Norman S. Hall, Wyndham Gittens, Herbert Dolmas. The setting is changed from Mongo to Mars. The 99min edited-down version was The Deadly Ray from Mars (1938).The final FG movie serial was Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe(1940; vt Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe), dir Ford Beebe, Ray Taylor, with the same leadingactors except that Carol Hughes replaced Jean Rogers as Dale Arden.12 two-reel episodes. Screenplay George H. Plympton, Basil Dickey, Barry Shipman. This, the weakest of the three, kills off Ming (again) at the end. According to one account the true title shown on the original episodes was Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers Conquer the Universe; the soldiers would have been Ming's, and Flash is trying to stop him. This would explain the oddity of the usually accepted title, since Flash was not a universe-conqueror by disposition.The 87min edited-down version was Purple Death From Outer Space (1940).The three FG film serials continue to have a cult following and are regularly revived on tv and in the cinema.3. US tv series (1951) from DuMont, starring Steve Holland. It was low-budget and universally execrated, lasting only one season.4. Film (1980). Columbia/EMI/Warner. Prod Dino De Laurentiis. Dir Michael Hodges, starring Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Topol, Max Von Sydow, Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton. Screenplay Lorenzo Semple Jr, based on the early episodes of the comic strip by Raymond. 115 mins. Colour.As a producer, De Laurentiis has always had a weakness for over-the-top, fantastic parodies (sometimes successful, as in DIABOLIK [1967] and BARBARELLA [1967]) but here his instincts let him down badly. Apart from the fetishistic costumes (leather, spikes, etc.) there is little of interest in this tongue-in-cheek, lurid fantasy, which tries to make a comic-strip virtue of wooden acting. The plot is largely derived from the 1936 film serial, and the rushed special effects similarly recall the ludicrousness of that film. The romantic elements are subjugated to a rather listless kinkiness. [PN/JB]See also: CINEMA. FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE FLASH GORDON. FLASH GORDON STRANGE ADVENTURE MAGAZINE US BEDSHEET-size PULP MAGAZINE. 1 issue, Dec 1936, published by C.J.H. Publications; ed Harold HERSEY. The featured novel was "The Master of Mars" by James E. Northfield. FGSAM, intended to be a monthly juvenile magazine, was notable for its coloured interior illustrations in a comic-strip format. A failed attempt to cash in on the popularity of the comic strip FLASH GORDON, its sole issue is now a rare collector's item. [FHP/MJE] FLASH GORDON'S TRIP TO MARS FLASH GORDON. FLECKER, (HERMAN) JAMES ELROY (1884-1915) UK poet, playwright and novelist best known for Hassan (1922), a fantasy play with an Arabian Nights flavour. His only novel, The King of Alsander (1914), was also a fantasy. He is of sf interest for The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (1908 chap), whose narrator is spirited into times moderately close to the present where he witnesses the self-willed extinction of the human race through a refusal to breed more children into this vale of tears. The narrator is then taken much further forward, where he discovers that apes (see APES AND CAVEMEN) are destined to become the masters of the planet and "try again". This tale was later collected along with some fantasies in Collected Prose (coll 1920). [JC]See also: END OF THE WORLD. FLEHR, PAUL [s] Frederik POHL. FLEMING, HARRY William Henry Fleming BIRD. FLEMING, IAN (LANCASTER) (1908-1964) UK writer, brother of Peter FLEMING. Neither the use of advanced technological gadgetry nor the fantastic plots of his enormously successful James Bond sequence of thrillers makes them genuine sf. The closest any of them comes to an sf plot is Moonraker (1955), whose eponymous rocket is rather ahead of its time. Many of IF's novels have been filmed, usually with additional sf-like gadgetry and completely reworked plots. The first of these films was DR NO (1962); YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) featured Bond crushing an attempt at world domination which involved the kidnapping of orbital satellites. MOONRAKER (1979) involves an orbital satellite and the Space Shuttle. [JC/PN]See also: ISLANDS; TECHNOTHRILLER; VILLAINS. FLEMING, (ROBERT) PETER (1907-1971) UK travel writer and novelist, brother of Ian FLEMING. He is known mainly for such travel books as Brazilian Adventure (1933). In his spoof sf novel, The Flying Visit (1940), Adolf Hitler parachutes into the UK with amusing results. The tale was reprinted, along with a fantasy, "The Man with Two Hands", in With the Guards to Mexico! and Other Excursions (coll 1957). The Sixth Column: A Singular Tale of our Time (1951), a satirical political thriller set in an implied NEAR FUTURE, verges on sf. [JC]Other works: Some of the tales in A Story to Tell (coll 1942) are fantasies; Invasion 1940 (1957; vt Operation Sea Lion 1957 US), a nonfiction study of German preparations to invade the UK, speculatively presents a successful assault ( HITLER WINS). FLEMING, STUART [s] Damon KNIGHT. FLESCH, HANS [r] GERMANY. FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN FRANKENSTEIN. FLESH GORDON Film (1974). Mammoth/Graffiti. Dir Michael Benveniste, Howard Ziehm, starring Jason Williams, Suzanne Fields, John Hoyt. Screenplay Benveniste, William Hunt. 90 mins, cut to 84 mins, cut to 78 mins. Colour.This burlesque of FLASH GORDON began as a cheap soft-porn film, but became relatively expensive as the special effects became more elaborate. Work on it continued for nearly two years and many special-effects technicians were involved, some uncredited; they included Jim Danforth, Dave Allen, Rick Baker, Greg Jein, George Barr and Dennis Muren. Several of the effects sequences include model animation of a high standard, in particular the climax, when a monster, the Great God Porno, clutching the heroine, scales a building in the manner of KING KONG while muttering a series of surly asides. A duel with an animated insect-creature rivals the best of Ray HARRYHAUSEN's work. The makers were so pleased with the effects that they cleaned it up a bit, and it was released without the feared X-rating. Most of the jokes are variants on the undergraduate ploy of inserting sexual references - e.g., there is a penisaurus - into a context that was originally downright puritanical. [JB] FLETCHER, GEORGE U. Fletcher PRATT. FLETCHER, JOSEPH SMITH (1863-1935) UK writer of popular fiction, much of it for boys. The Wonderful City (1894), for instance, carries its youthful protagonist to a doomed lost race ( LOST WORLDS) in Central America. Morrison's Machine (1900), an adult tale, analyses the relationship of scientific Man to the MACHINES he was creating at the turn of the century ( SCIENTISTS). The Three Days' Terror (1901), like The Ransom for London (1914), deals with NEAR-FUTURE threats to the stability of the UK. [JC]Other works: The Air-Ship, and Other Stories (coll 1903); The Wheatstack, and Other Stories (coll 1909); Many Engagements (coll 1923); The Matheson Formula (1929 US); The House in Tuesday Market (1930); The Man in No. 3, and Other Stories of Crime, Love and Mystery (coll 1931). FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR Film (1986). Producers Sales/New Star Entertainment/Walt Disney. Dir Randal Kleiser, starring Joey Cramer, Veronica Cartwright, Cliff De Young, Howard Hesseman, Paul Mall. Screenplay Michael Burton, Matt MacManus, based on a story by Mark H. Baker. 89 mins. Colour.Made for children, this might - one would think - be rather disturbing for them. A 12-year-old (Cramer) returns home after a fall and finds the wrong people living there. The police take him to where his family now live, where he learns that it is eight years later, that he has been missing, presumed dead, and that his kid brother has become his post-pubertal big brother. Tests reveal that our hero has strange brainwaves, some of which are read by a computer as a picture of a flying saucer, just like one that has recently been found but has proved unopenable. The boy locates the saucer and meets inside it the robotic alien Max (Mall), who clearly recognizes him, addressing him as The Navigator, an aspect of his recent past which is news to him, since he lost his memory after the saucer's crashlanding. Because he has been travelling at FASTER-THAN-LIGHT speeds to the alien's planet and back, the boy has not grown noticeably older. Unhappy at his role in this unnerving future, he persuades Max to return him (normality comfortingly restored) back through time to 1978. This film presents what is actually rather a nightmare scenario, and carries it off with considerable aplomb for the first half; but it sinks quickly into routine post- E.T.: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL scenes once the flying saucer and alien have been introduced. [PN] FLIGHT UNLIMITED SHAYOL. FLINT, HOMER EON (1892-1924) US writer (born Flindt) whose work appeared mainly in the Frank A. MUNSEY magazines from the teens of the century. His first sf story was "The Planeteer" for All-Story Weekly in 1918; it deals with sexual rivalry and personal ambition in a Bellamistic ( Edward BELLAMY) society. Its sequel, "The King of Conserve Island" (1918), describes the corruption and collapse of the socialist world under the propaganda attacks of a reactionary, capitalist society. The Dr Kinney stories examine the implications of various political ideas: "The Lord of Death" (1919) describes the ultimate Spencerian survival of the fittest on MERCURY; "The Queen of Life" (1919) is based on the opposite point of view, preservation of life for its own sake and Malthusianism on a VENUS characterized by superscience; "The Devolutionist" (1921) covers the ambivalences of an efficient, more or less benevolent dictatorship and a bumblingly anarchistic or democratic underground; and the final story, "The Emancipatrix" (1921), contrasts a hive world and primitive humans on a ring-shaped planet. In the last two stories, the alien contact takes place by means of an apparatus acquired from Venus. HEF's writing style and PULP-MAGAZINE habits did not always adequately express his deep interest in the emergence of behavioural and historical patterns from various political and social philosophies. The series was much later assembled as The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix (1921 Argosy; coll of linked stories 1965) and The Lord of Death and The Queen of Life (1919 All-Story Weekly; coll of linked stories 1965).HEF is remembered in part for the mystery of his death (having picked up a hitchhiker - who turned out to have had a criminal record - he was found dead in his crashed car) and rather more for his sf novel with Austin HALL (whom see for details), The Blind Spot (1921 Argosy; 1951). However, the Dr Kinney stories are his real legacy. [EFB/JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF; PARALLEL WORLDS; PLANETARY ROMANCE. FLIPSIDE OF DOMINICK HIDE, THE Made-for-tv film (1980). BBC TV. Dir Alan Gibson, starring Peter Firth, Caroline Langrishe, Pippa Guard, Patrick Magee. Teleplay Gibson, Jeremy Paul. 95 mins. Colour.This was an unexpected success, winning several awards. Hide (Firth) travels back in a flying saucer ( UFOS) from the somewhat austere AD2130 to contemporary London to do historical research. A Candide-figure, he is confused but cheerful about what he finds, falls in love, and (of course) becomes his own great-great-great-grandfather. This film is unusual in not being pessimistic about modern life, and uses its future perspective cleverly to provide a sort of instant nostalgia for the present day. The sequel, Another Flip for Dominick (1982), 85 mins, made by and starring the same people, has Hide revisiting the past in search of a missing colleague; it is less memorable. [PN] FLOOD, ELOISE Bill MCCAY. FLUTE, MOLLY Eileen LOTTMAN. FLY, THE 1. Film (1958). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Kurt Neumann, starring Al (David) Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price. Screenplay James Clavell, based on "The Fly" (1957) by George LANGELAAN. 94 mins. Colour.A scientist experimenting with MATTER TRANSMISSION accidentally gets mixed with a fly and ends up with its head and arm (or leg). He has retained his own brain, however, and with the help of his wife tries to reverse the procedure. But the complementarily deformed fly refuses to be caught, and the scientist is driven to commit suicide by putting his head in a steam press. The final sequence shows the fly, with tiny scientist's head and arm, trapped in a spider's web and screaming "Help me!" (which makes one wonder where the fly's brain ended up). An absurd film whose ludicrous excesses are amusing, and lavishly produced for a horror/ MONSTER movie, it was a financial success and spawned two low-budget sequels, RETURN OF THE FLY (1959) and CURSE OF THE FLY (1965). [JB]2. Film (1986). Brooksfilms/20th Century-Fox. Dir David CRONENBERG, starring Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz. Screenplay Charles Edward Pogue, Cronenberg, based on the Langelaan story. 100 mins, cut to 96 mins. Colour.This blackly comic remake is radically more sophisticated and more horrific than its original. In this version the (this time unmarried) scientist's accident leads to a melding of genetic material, and his transformation into fly is gradual and protracted. With it comes a sexual and creative potency and a capacity for destruction hitherto only latent in the idealistic, repressed Seth Brundle, movingly acted by Goldblum. As usual Cronenberg confronts the vulnerable and ephemeral nature of the human body by imagining it metamorphosed; where other people use words to create metaphor, Cronenberg uses the flesh, ambiguously evoking exultation and disgust, the grotesque and the beautiful. [PN]See also: CINEMA; SEX. FLY II, THE Film (1989). Brooksfilms/20th Century-Fox. Dir Chris Walas, starring Eric Stoltz, Daphne Zuniga, Lee Richardson. Screenplay Mick Garris, Jim Wheat, Ken Wheat, Frank Darabont, based on a story by Garris. 104 mins. Colour.This is a genuine sequel to the 1986 remake of The FLY , not just a lame excuse for more horrific "fly" effects. Chris Walas, the skilled technician who created those effects for the earlier film, here made his directorial debut, and surprised many by doing so assured a job of it. Seth Brundle's girlfriend, made pregnant by him in the previous film, dies after giving birth to a "monster"; beneath the larva-like casing is an apparently normal baby. At age 5, however, the child has a near-adult appearance and superintelligence. His adoptive father, head of Bartok Industries, is secretly determined to exploit both Brundle's son and his MATTER-TRANSMISSION device, realizing that the genetic melding the device allows gives him a handle for controlling "the form and function of all life". The subtext is more reassuring than in CRONENBERG's earlier film, and TFII becomes a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, with a crude but satisfying comeuppance for Bartok at the end. Though Cronenberg is the one popularly supposed to show disgust for the flesh, it is Walas whose more conventional affection for normality has the effect of reducing the son's metamorphosis to a mere occasion for horror. This deeply conservative film is less subtle than its predecessor, though it has interesting Freudian reverberations, and many people will prefer Walas's emphasis on the corruption of an external agency (Industry) to Cronenberg's emphasis on the tragic divisions of the Self. [PN]See also: CINEMA; MONSTER MOVIES. FLYING SAUCERS UFOS. FLYING SAUCERS In 1947, U.S. businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his plane near Mt. Rainier in Washington when he reported a strange sight - nine "discs" in the sky. He described their pattern as being "like a saucer would be if you skipped it across the water." And that's how the term "flying saucer" was born.The flying saucer craze was to become a part of 1950s culture. More recently, tales of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, pop up everywhere. Some viewers have claimed that they were prodded and poked by the aliens within. SF writers, for the most part, find such stories unbelievable. What interests them is the public’s obsession with the phenomenon of spaceship sightings and first contact experiences. FLYING SAUCERS FROM OTHER WORLDS OTHER WORLDS. FLYNN, MICHAEL F(RANCIS) (1947- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Slan Libh" in ASF in 1984, and who soon became identified as one of the most sophisticated and stylistically acute 1980s Analog regulars, some of his work appearing as by Rowland Shew. His first novel, In the Country of the Blind (1990), is an alternate-history thriller based on the premise that Charles BABBAGE's early-19th-century COMPUTER did in fact work, and is being used by a secret society to predict (and therefore to control) events. A 20th-century woman hacker discovers the conspiracy and exposes its databases by use of a computer worm. Babbage's computer, by coincidence, features similarly in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK) by William GIBSON and Bruce STERLING. MFF's second novel was Fallen Angels (1991) with Larry NIVEN (whom see for details) and Jerry POURNELLE. His third, The Nanotech Chronicles (1991), presents, with all MFF's engagingly lurid competence, a tale which exploits current speculations about the future of molecular engineering. MFF is on the verge of becoming a central creator of HARD SF. [JC]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; MACHINES; STEAMPUNK. FOLDES, PETER [r] HUNGARY. FOLINGSBY, KENNETH A possible pseudonym of a probable Scotsman whose Meda: A Tale of the Future (1891), though the events it recounts turn out to be a dream, remains of interest for the imaginative scope of the AD5575 depicted, in which large-headed brainy "Scotonians" are fed by ambient electricity, possess ANTIGRAVITY, and represent the end of a long (and detailed) world-history, including a comet HOLOCAUST. The protagonist begins to have erotic longings, and awakens. [JC] FOLLETT, JAMES (1939- ) UK writer of fiction and technical material; most of his sf work has been for BBC TV or BBC RADIO. His sf work, which is not remarkable, includes: The Doomsday Ultimatum (1976); Ice (1978); Earth Search (1981), based on his BBC radio serial; Torus (1990); Trojan (1991), about a computer virus from Mars. [JC] FOLLETT, KEN Working name of UK writer Kenneth Martin Follett (1949- ), most famous for thrillers like Storm Island (1978; vt The Eye of the Needle 1978 US), but who, under pseudonyms, has also written some sf. The Power Twins and the Worm Puzzle: A Science Fantasy for Young People (1976) as by Martin Martinsen was a juvenile; Amok: King of Legend (1976) as by Bernard L. Ross was marginal fantasy; Capricorn One * (1978) as by Ross was one of two novelizations - the other being by Ron GOULART - of the film CAPRICORN ONE (1978). [JC] FONTANA, D(OROTHY) C(ATHERINE) (1939- ) US writer, primarily for tv; she was associated with STAR TREK as its story editor, eventually writing Vulcan's Glory * (1989) for the series of novelizations. She was later involved with the two tv series The FANTASTIC JOURNEY and LOGAN'S RUN. The Questor Tapes * (1974) is based on a series pilot written by Gene RODDENBERRY and Gene L. Coon, who created Star Trek, and released as The QUESTOR TAPES. It tells of the creation of an ANDROID who eventually plans to combat evil in secret. The pilot did not lead to a series. DCF has written a number of tv episodes in addition to her work as a story editor. [JC]See also: WAR OF THE WORLDS. FONTENAY, CHARLES L(OUIS) (1917- ) US newspaperman and writer, born in Brazil and raised in Tennessee, spending his life there. He was a member of the If stable from the publication of his first story, "Disqualified", in 1954, and wrote three somewhat routine sf novels: Twice Upon a Time (1958 dos), Rebels of the Red Planet (1961 dos), an intrigue set on Mars, and The Day the Oceans Overflowed (1964), in which the manner of their doing so is scientifically ill motivated. Epistle to the Babylonians (1969), nonfiction, deals in part with the philosophy of science. [JC] FONTENELLE, BERNARD LE BOVYER DE (1657-1757) French man of letters whose work pointed forward to the Age of Reason; nephew of the dramatist Corneille. He wrote much, and one of his most important books became a seminal influence on PROTO SCIENCE FICTION: Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans J. Glanvill as The Plurality of Worlds 1929). This is one of the earliest works ever written popularizing science, notably ASTRONOMY, for the layman, which it does by wittily presenting its speculations - many about the possibility of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS - in the form of conversations after dinner between the author and a marquise. In 1697 he became permanent secretary of the the Academie des Sciences, a post he held for 44 years. [PN]See also: COSMOLOGY; FRANCE; STARS; VENUS. FOOD OF THE GODS Film (1976). AIP. Prod and dir Bert I. Gordon, starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker, Ida Lupino. Screenplay Gordon, based on a "portion" of The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth (1904) by H.G. WELLS. 88 mins. Colour.Set on an island off the coast of British Columbia, FOTG tells of a miraculous foodstuff which oozes from the ground and causes gigantism in all infant creatures that eat it ( GREAT AND SMALL). Animated wasps, plastic caterpillars and out-of-focus chickens (all huge) are wholly unconvincing, but the giant rats (ordinary rats shot in miniature sets) are marginally plausible - which is more than can be said for most of the actors and all of the script, though Meeker is effectively creepy as the wicked industrialist out to exploit the Food. Nothing of the Wells novel survives in this rat-drowning epic, which purports to be a revenge-of-Nature film - like so many from its ECOLOGY-conscious period. [PN] FORBES, ALEXANDER (1882-? ) US writer whose sf novel, The Radio Gunner (1924), depicts a future WAR set in 1937 between Northern Europe, in alliance with the USA, and the Constantinople Coalition. AF's predictive powers were poor and his eponymous hero, who knows how to locate radios, fails to enthrall. [JC] FORBIDDEN PLANET Film (1956). MGM. Dir Fred McLeod Wilcox, starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens. Screenplay Cyril Hume, based on a story by Irving Block and Allen ADLER. 98 mins. Colour.Although Wilcox was new to sf cinema (his best-known film was Lassie Come Home, [1943]), FP is one of the most attractive movies in the genre. Some of the more interesting resonances of FP stem from its being an updated version of Shakespeare's The Tempest (c1611). Prospero is Morbius, an obsessive scientist living alone with his daughter Altaira (the virginal Miranda figure) on the planet Altair IV. Ariel is a charming metal creature, Robby the Robot (who became so popular - the first ROBOT star since METROPOLIS - that another film, The INVISIBLE BOY [1957], was made as a special vehicle for him). The film opens with a spaceship landing to investigate the fate of a colony whose sole survivors are Morbius and Altaira. The crew is menaced by an invisible Caliban, which proves to be a "Monster from the Id" and eventually destroys its unwitting creator, Morbius; holocaust follows. Altaira is saved.The plot, mixing the tawdry and the potent, is very sophisticated for the time - astonishingly so for a film originally designed for a juvenile audience, especially in the intimations of incestuous feelings of the father for the daughter. The dialogue is slick and unmemorable. The best sequences involve a tour of the still-functioning artefacts, spectacular and mysterious, dwarfing the humans passing among them, of an awesomely powerful vanished race, the Krel. The visual treatment of FP was unsurpassed until 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, made 12 years later. Despite its flaws, it remains one of the few masterpieces of sf cinema.Forbidden Planet * (1956), based on the film, was by W. J. Stuart (Philip MACDONALD). [PN]See also: INTELLIGENCE; MONSTER MOVIES; MUSIC; PARANOIA; VILLAINS. FORBIDDEN WORLD (vt MUTANT) Film (1982). New World. Dir Allan Holzman, starring Jesse Vint, June Chadwick, Dawn Dunlap, Linden Chiles, Fox Harris, Raymond Oliver. Screenplay Tim Curnen. 86 mins. Colour.This cheap imitation of ALIEN (1979), from Roger CORMAN's New World exploitation factory, is distinguished by its gleefully sleazy nature and amusing cynicism. An outer-space troubleshooter (Vint) is awakened from cryo-sleep ( CRYONICS), casually informed that he is now younger than his son, and despatched to a remote planet where a genetically engineered organism has run amok. Although generally predictable, this is fast-paced and does produce one astonishing coup by having its MONSTER, which replicates the cell structure of anything it devours, defeated when a terminally ill scientist feeds it his own cancerous liver, an organ he has removed during anaesthetic-free self-surgery. Vint's grimy hero imports a bit of welcome humour, and the film makes good use of the generically required exploitation elements, intercutting a formulaic sex scene with oddly poignant vignettes of the space-station staff whiling away the time at the end of the Universe. Some of FW's sets and effects crop up again in ANDROID (1982). [KN] FORBIN PROJECT, THE COLOSSUS, THE FORBIN PROJECT. FORCE FIELD In sf TERMINOLOGY - unlike physics, where it has a different meaning - a force field (sometimes a force shield) is usually an invisible protective sphere or wall of force. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the force field performed sterling service, notably in E.E. "Doc" SMITH's Skylark and Lensmen series, where force fields under attack glow red and orange and then all the way up through the spectrum until they reach violet and black and break down. Force fields are also a sovereign remedy against DEATH RAYS and usually bullets, too, though not against swords in Charles L. HARNESS's Flight into Yesterday (1953; vt The Paradox Men dos), in which the efficacy of the shield is directly proportional to the momentum of the object it resists; this property of force fields gives Harness a good excuse to introduce swordplay (where the momentums are relatively small) into a technologically advanced society - an example that other writers were not slow to follow. Robert SHECKLEY's "Early Model" (1956) tells of a force field so efficient that it renders its wearer almost incapable of carrying out any action at all that might conceivably endanger him. The eponymous device in Poul ANDERSON's Shield (1963) can recharge its batteries by soaking up the kinetic energy of the bullets it stops. But these are comparatively late examples, when the concept was sufficiently familiar in sf to allow parody and sophisticated variations.It is the essence of an sf force field that by a kind of judo it converts the energy of an attacking force and repels it back on itself. Few writers, however, were able to give - or concerned to try to give - a convincing rationale for forces being conveniently able to curve themselves around an object and to take on some of the properties of hard, resistant matter. A well ground mirror might more plausibly carry out the same function, at least against death rays. The true rationale for the force field and for its close relations, the tractor beam (which pulls objects towards the beamer) and the pressor beam (which pushes them away), is that - like FASTER THAN LIGHT travel - they help tell stories. [PN] FORD, ASHTON Don PENDLETON. FORD, DOUGLAS MORET (? -? ) UK writer whose A Time of Terror: The Story of a Great Revenge (A.D. 1910) (1906; vt A Time of Terror: The Story of a Great Revenge (A.D. 1912) 1908) pits the UK, aided by a valiant underground organization, against the Kaiser's invading forces. The Raid of Dover: A Romance of the Reign of Woman, A.D. 1940 (1910) was fairly mild-mannered. [JC] FORD, FORD MADOX (1873-1939) UK writer and editor, born (Joseph Leonard) Ford (Hermann) Madox Hueffer into a literary family of German descent. In protest at German behaviour in WWI he changed his name to FMF, though typically he refrained from doing so until hostilities had ended; both original books and reprints after 1919 are signed FMF. A versatile man of letters, founder/editor of the English Review and the Transatlantic Review, he is best known for The Good Soldier (1915) and the four Tietjens novels assembled as Parade's End (omni 1950 US). His first book, The Brown Owl (1892), was a children's fantasy. The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901) with Joseph CONRAD (whom see for details) is sf. Fantasies include Mr Apollo (1908), The "Half Moon": A Romance of the Old World and the New (1909), a complex story of 17th-century witchcraft, and Ladies whose Bright Eyes (1911), a TIME-TRAVEL tale. The Simple Life Limited (1911), as by Daniel Chaucer, attacks utopianism. FMF inserted into the murkily RURITANIAN The New Humpty-Dumpty (1912), also as by Daniel Chaucer, a rather savage caricature of H.G. WELLS, who appears as Herbert Pett, a "cockney" Great Thinker and philanderer, with a high-pitched voice, who fatally intermixes sex and revolution. Vive le Roy (1936 US) delineates a struggle for power in a future monarchical France. [JC] FORD, GARRETT William L. CRAWFORD. FORD, JOHN M(ILO) (1957- ) US writer. He is author of some children's fiction under an unrevealed pseudonym. He began publishing sf under his own name with "This, Too, We Reconcile" for ASF in 1976. His Alternities Corporation sequence appeared in magazines 1979-81. His first novel, Web of Angels (1980), can be seen in retrospect as a quite remarkable rendering of the basic venues exploited by CYBERPUNK some years later, though its traditional rite-of-passage plot bears little resemblance to the quest-for-Nirvana structure given definitive form by William GIBSON in NEUROMANCER (1984). Beyond that basic distinction in dynamic thrust, however, and beyond JMF's failure (or disinclination) to make use of film-noir icons and the hegemony of corporate Japan, the eponymous commmunication/data web much resembles CYBERSPACE, though intergalactic in scope; the cowboy hacker protagonist hired out to a merchant prince is also familiar, as are the Web's automatic defence systems - Geisthounds - which hunt him remorselessly. JMF's second novel, The Princes of the Air (1982), is a florid SPACE OPERA whose detail is more enthralling than its span. The Dragon Waiting (1983) is an ALTERNATE-WORLD fantasy set in an unChristianized (and dragonless) medieval Europe; it won the 1984 World Fantasy AWARD. The Final Reflection * (1984), Star Trek: Voyage to Adventure * (1984) (as Michael J. Dodge) and How Much for Just the Planet? * (1987) are STAR TREK ties; The Scholars of Night (1988) is an associational thriller; Casting Fortune * (coll 1989), set in the Liavek SHARED-WORLD enterprise, contains in "The Illusionist" a book-length tale of theatrical MAGIC; and Fugue State (1987 in Under the Wheel ed Elizabeth Mitchell; rev1990 dos) is a complex sf exploration of an imprisoned psyche. GROWING UP WEIGHTLESS (1993) - which tied for the 1994 PHILIP K. DICK AWARD with Jack WOMACK's Elvissey (1993) - depicts life on the Moon in terms that seem realistic, for the human settlement there lives under strait conditions, and has a difficult relationship with Earth; but the rite of passage into adulthood at the tale's centre is not innovative. Two decades into his career, there remains some sense that JMF remains unwilling or unable to create a definitive style or mode; but his originality is evident, a shifting feisty energy informs almost everything he writes, and that career is still young. [JC]Other works: On Writing Science Fiction (The Editors Strike Back!) (anth 1981) with Darrell SCHWEITZER and George H. SCITHERS.See also: FANTASY; GAMES AND TOYS; POETRY; TIMESCAPE BOOKS. FOREST, JEAN-CLAUDE [r] BARBARELLA. FORESTER, C(ECIL) S(COTT) (1899-1966) UK writer best known for his work outside the sf field, especially the Horatio Hornblower novels (from 1937). In addition to several sf stories - including the substantial HITLER-WINS novella, "If Hitler had Invaded England" (1960), which was posthumously collected in Gold from Crete (coll 1971) - he published a novel, The Peacemaker (1934 US), about a pacifist mathematician and schoolteacher who tries to force peace on the world through his invention of a magnetic disruptor that stops machinery. He fails. [JC]Other works: Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1942 US), a juvenile fantasy.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION. FOREVER YOUNG Film (1992). Warner Bros. Exec prods Edward S. Feldman and Jeffrey Abrams, prod Bruce Davey, dir Steve Miner, starring Mel Gibson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Elijah Wood, Isabel Glasser and George Wendt. Screenplay Abrams. 101 mins. Colour.In 1939, when his girl friend (Glasser) lapses into apparently terminal coma after being hit by a car, grief-stricken test pilot McCormick (Gibson) volunteers for a one-year experiment in CRYONICS conducted, conveniently, by his best friend (Wendt). The friend dies, and the secret experiment sits unnoticed in a military warehouse until 1992, when two small boys accidentally open the cryonic chamber, and McCormick revives, apparently still a sexy youngish man. He copes well with life 53 years on, and while being pursued by federal agents he forms a relationship with a feisty but somewhat depressed nurse (Curtis). Soon, however, it becomes clear that McCormick is ageing very rapidly. Fortunately he has previously taught the nurse's small son (Wood) to fly old bombers, since he becomes too old to operate the one he steals to elude the feds. The boy lands them safely at the house of his one-time girl friend, who, it transpires, has recovered from her coma but is now aged around eighty. The two wrinkled old persons embrace, in a culminating scene that elicits embarrassment rather than the intended tears. A romantic weepie, a thriller, a comedy, a boys' adventure film: the mix is ill judged. The sf elements are among the better things, especially the reversal of the usual stereotype, where McCormick is able, quite plausibly, to adjust rapidly to a much changed world. [PN] FORGOTTEN FANTASY US DIGEST-size magazine. 5 issues Oct 1970-June 1971, published by Nectar Press, Hollywood, ed Douglas MENVILLE. FF reprinted some ancient fantasy stories, but the long novel serialized in #1-#4, The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892) by William R. BRADSHAW, was probably too dated to be successful even in the nostalgia market. A second serial, Hartmann, the Anarchist (1893), by E. Douglas FAWCETT, began in #5. With his associate editor, R. REGINALD, Menville went on to publish in book form the Forgotten Fantasy Library (1973-80), 24 vols of reprint material. [FHP/PN] FORMAN, JAMES D(OUGLAS) (1932- ) US writer whose sf novels are for a young-adult audience. They began with Call Back Yesterday (1981) and its sequel, Doomsday Plus Twelve (1984), a studiedly and effectively admonitory presentation of nuclear HOLOCAUST as an event having little to do - contra much wish-fulfilment SURVIVALIST FICTION - with post-Bomb opportunities for self-fulfilment. In the first volume, a teenaged US girl's flirtation in the Middle East sets off, through a chain of stupidities, the final war; in the second, 12 years later, a young girl persuades the remnants of the US Army not to try to attack a benevolent Japan, which has had nothing to do with the war. Cry Havoc (1988), somewhat less interestingly, features the creation of killer dogs through GENETIC ENGINEERING gone awry. [JC] FORREST, HENRY J. (? -? ) UK writer known only for the early sf UTOPIA, A Dream of Reform (1848), which tamely introduces the usual visitor to a mildly socialist planet designed on anti-industrial lines. The book is thus a vague precursor to the work of William MORRIS. [JC] FORREST, MARYANN Pseudonym of an unidentified Australian writer in whose Here (Away from it All) (1969 UK; vt Here 1970 US) the residents of a Mediterranean island must deal with the consequences of the HOLOCAUST. [JC] FORSTCHEN, WILLIAM R. (1950- ) US writer who has generally concentrated on series, beginning with the Ice Prophet sequence - Ice Prophet (1983), The Flame upon the Ice (1984) and A Darkness upon the Ice (1985) - set on Earth at some point in the future after an ecological disaster has caused the planet to become icebound. In this world technology has, according to the orthodox sf assumptions, been foolishly banned, and the eponymous prophet heralds a revival of science; but the intricacies of the realpolitik which doom him personally, and the beauties of the ice world itself, go some way to keep the sequence from being unduly familiar. The Gamester War novels - The Alexandrian Ring (1987), The Assassin Gambit (1988) and The Napoleon Wager (1993) - show a similar competence and a whole-hearted involvement in the most far-reaching dictates that SPACE OPERA can demand on those who treat its premises seriously, featuring a race of intergalactic overlords who permit the citizens of Earth and many other planets to engage in vast GAME-WORLD-like conflicts and to import, through TIME TRAVEL, figures like Alexander the Great to fight wagered wars on the enormous ringworld that serves as arena. The Crystal series, written with Greg Morrison - The Crystal Warriors (1988) and The Crystal Sorcerers (1991) - is fantasy. The Lost Regiment sequence - Rally Cry! (1990), Union Forever (1991),Terrible Swift Sword (1992) and Fateful Lightning (1993) - reworks the basic structure of the Gamester War books, this time from the perspective of a Civil War Union troop transported through time to a medieval planet secretly dominated by remote aliens. Into the Sea of Stars (1986) is a singleton, as is Star Voyager Academy (1994); Wing Commander III: Fleet Action* (1994) is part of a multi-author series tied to a computer game, and Magic: The Gathering Arena* (1994) is tied to a trading-card game. WRF is a genre writer of shining efficiency, and is technically capable of the most ambitious work. [JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS. FORSTER, E(DWARD) M(ORGAN) (1879-1970) UK writer of essays and novels, the best known being A Passage to India (1924). The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories (coll 1911) assembles several fantasies of interest, but EMF's importance to sf lies wholly in his short story "The Machine Stops" (1909), collected in The Eternal Moment (coll 1928), which includes further fantasies. Both books were assembled as Collected Short Stories (coll 1947; vt Collected Tales 1974 US). Cast in the form of a warning look at the distant future, rather in the mode of H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), "The Machine Stops" directly attacks, as many critics noted and as EMF himself acknowledged, the rational World State that Wells promulgated in A Modern Utopia (1905). In the hivelike underground society EMF envisions, freedom and (paramountly) the value of the individual human's personal relations with others of his kind have been eliminated. When the state collapses - when the machine stops - the depersonalized ciphers underground perish, while above, on the surface, a few genuine humans survive. In any study of the relation of DYSTOPIA to UTOPIA, the story is of vital interest. [JC]See also: AUTOMATION; CITIES; HISTORY OF SF; LEISURE; TECHNOLOGY; VIRTUAL REALITY. FORSYTH, FREDERICK (1938- ) UK writer who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental timeslip fantasy about a WWII pilot, and both The Devil's Alternative (1979) and The Negotiator (1989) are NEAR-FUTURE thrillers, the first predicting the failure of the Russian harvest, the second predicting (wrongly) a Soviet-generated crisis. [JC] FORT, CHARLES (HOY) (1874-1932) US journalist and author. Working from extensive notes collected mainly from newspapers, magazines and scientific journals, CF compiled a series of books containing information on "inexplicable" incidents and phenomena. Though characterized as an anti-scientist, CF reserved his attacks for the "scientific priestcraft" and their dogmatic "damning" of unconventional or unwanted observations. CF's own belief was simply a monistic faith in the unity of all things, and this forms the principal connection between his apparently unrelated groups of data. His books are written in an eccentric style and are interspersed with wilfully absurd theories and ideas. The first two, both still (1992) unpublished, were called simply X and Y; X proposes that Earth is controlled from MARS and Y supports the HOLLOW-EARTH hypothesis. The Book of the Damned (1919) and New Lands (1923) are largely concerned with astronomical and meteorological events, while Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932) are more interested in human and animal phenomena. The four published books are crammed with data, and the sheer bulk of information is impressive; however, there is no attempt to evaluate the numerous reports cited, so that silly-season urban legends and hoax stories are jumbled in with a too-sparse leavening of more reliable accounts. Reading CF therefore feels much like eating a stew of dubious provenance: the taste is good but one worries about what went into it. CF himself was perfectly aware that much of his data was, to say the least, doubtful; of The Book of the Damned he wrote: "This book is fiction, like Gulliver's Travels, The Origin of Species, Newton's Principia, and every history of the United States." Moreover, he was reluctant to invent theories (other than whimsical ones) to account for his data - a humility that distances his books from the sketchy fantasies of later writers such as Erich VON DANIKEN.After CF's death, compilation of data was continued by the Fortean Society, founded in 1931 by a group that included Ben HECHT, John Cowper POWYS, Alexander Woollcott (1887-1943) and Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), and in the journals Doubt (US) and Lo! (UK). Information is currently collected by the International Fortean Organization, who publish INFO Journal, and by the UK publication Fortean Times. Prominent modern Forteans include William F. Corliss, John Michell and Robert J.M. Rickard.CF's list of bizarre observations and events (from astronomical heresies to teleportation cases), together with his demand for original and undogmatic interpretation, influenced and stimulated many sf writers. CF's most enthusiastic sf follower was Eric Frank RUSSELL, who considered him "the only real genius sf ever had"; Russell's Sinister Barrier (1943) and Dreadful Sanctuary (1951) are based on Fortean ideas. Damon KNIGHT, another author influenced by CF, published a standard biography, Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained (1970). The influence of CF's ideas on sf was particularly strong in the magazines ed John W. CAMPBELL Jr, Unknown and ASF. Fortean elements rarely appear in more recent written sf, though Patrick TILLEY's Fade-Out (1975) is one exception, and films such as CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), with its discovery of the famous "lost" Flight 19, maintain the tradition. [PR/JGr]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; ESP; Vol MOLESWORTH; PARANOIA; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; PSI POWERS; TELEKINESIS; TELEPORTATION. FORTRESS Film (1992, but released 1993). Fortress Films/Village Roadshow Pictures/Davis Entertainment Production. Dir Stuart Gordon; screenplay Steve Feinberg, Troy Neighbors; starring Christopher Lambert, Kurtwood Smith, Loryn Locklin, Lincoln Kilpatrick, Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez, Jeffrey Combs, Tom Towles, Vernon Wells. 95 mins. Colour.In a near-future and apparently semi-fascist USA it is illegal to have more than one child, and ex "Black Beret" soldier John Brennick (Lambert) and his pregnant wife (Locklin), having lost one child, get caught attempting to cross the border into Mexico. Both are imprisoned (in different areas) in the Fortress, a privately run 30-storey, futuristic, underground prison in the desert. The director is a demented cyborg, the gaolers are androids grown from redundant babies, the prisoners carry explosive balls in their stomach which explode during escape attempts and things look bad. In an escalating series of exploitation-movie over-the-top lunacies, a breakout is achieved, but not before pregnant Mrs Brennick is threatened with fatal Caesarean by circular saw. The film has only one redeeming feature, a sense that exploitation sf-cinema is fun, and its various unpleasantnesses are achieved with commendable vigour and bad taste. Lambert's performance is dire. This Australian/American co-production was the first of two sf future-prison break-out movies with military heroes to be made in Australia within two years, the other being No Escape, a more humane but less watchable film. [PN] FORWARD, ROBERT L(ULL) (1932- ) US physicist and writer, senior scientist at Hughes Research Laboratories and one of the most devoted HARD-SF authors of the 1980s. He began publishing sf with "The Singing Diamond" in Omni (1979), and made a very considerable impact with his first novel, DRAGON'S EGG (1980), which, along with its sequel Starquake! (1985), is set in a most intriguing venue - a NEUTRON STAR whose surface GRAVITY is 67,000,000,000 gees - and concentrates on the immensely enjoyable ALIEN cheela who inhabit this venue, living and evolving at an enormous rate (a generation passes in 37 minutes). The human scientists who visit the cheela of Dragon's Egg inadvertently civilize them over a 24-hour period. In the sequel the cheela, now evolved far beyond their glacial human teachers, very quickly explore the entire Galaxy, though the catastrophe of the title soon complicates the plot, leading to further rapid-fire EVOLUTION, invention and mind-play.RLF's second successful novel, The Flight of the Dragonfly (1982-3 ASF as "Rocheworld"; exp 1984; exp 1985; orig full version restored, vt Rocheworld 1990), posited a second world of almost equal fascination. On the eponymous dumb-bell-shaped double-planet is placed an alien race whose individuals are characterized more strongly than are the humans involved in an exploratory mission there. (Despite the striking resemblance in storylines and the titles, this novel is unrelated to the earlier series.) Once again the self-confident articulacy of RLF's scientific mind dominates proceedings, and the novel concludes (as did his first) with a symposium which analyses the ideas underlying the book. However, the unfortunate corollary to this style of novel-writing is that, when no scientific conceit governs the structure of the tale, character and plot can prove, as in RLF's case, a poor substitute. Martian Rainbow (1991), which has no such central world-building conceit to govern it, consequently fails to convince in its simplistic rendering of a Russian-US conflict on Mars, or in the cardboard triumphalism of its human cast. More than almost any other hard-sf writer, RLF dazzles within his bailiwick and embarrasses outside it. [JC]Other works: Timemaster (1992), a LIBERTARIAN tale.Nonfiction: Future Magic (1988); Mirror Matter: Pioneering Antimatter Physics (1988 ) with Joel Davis.See also: ASTRONOMY; PLANETARY ROMANCE; SCIENTISTS; STARS. FOSS, CHRIS(TOPHER) (1946- ) UK illustrator. CF studied architecture at Cambridge University, and has worked in sf ILLUSTRATION since 1970, primarily as a cover artist; he uses brush and airbrush to excellent effect. He is best known in sf circles for his hardware, particularly his SPACESHIPS: intricate, asymmetrical, almost Gothic, these have been deeply influential not only on other UK illustrators but also on film designers. Ever since STAR WARS (1977), most movie spacecraft look as if they have been designed by CF, even though they have not - although he did work as a concept artist on ALIEN (1979). (Paradoxically, outside sf, CF is better known in commercial illustration for his detailed figure studies; he did the many romantically erotic drawings for Alex COMFORT's The Joy of Sex [1972] and More Joy of Sex [1973].) CF's smooth, airbrushed, representational style, demonstrated on hundreds of covers, spearheaded a revolution in UK sf paperback design in the 1970s, and had many imitators. It was what the market wanted, and after a decade had become almost tedious in its predictability - though that was the publishers' fault, not CF's. His sf work is often a celebration of technology - monstrous spaceships or vast robots, beautiful and deadly, rear up over landscapes and skyscapes where humans are absent or tiny - yet the effect is bracing. Science Fiction Art (1976), with an introduction by Brian W. ALDISS, is a portfolio of his work; others are 21st Century Foss (1978) and The Chris Foss Portfolio (1990). Diary of a Spaceperson (1990) is unusual and not wholly successful in combining the erotic with the scientific in what purports to be the illustrated diary (written by CF) of a spacewoman who has sexual congress with an alien plant. [PN] See also: TECHNOLOGY. FOSTER, ALAN DEAN (1946- ) US writer, raised in Los Angeles; interestingly, he has listed Carl Barks (1901- ), the long-unacknowledged creator of the best COMIC strips and books in the Disney stable, as one of his formative influences (on his depiction of older characters). ADF began publishing sf with "Some Notes Concerning a Green Box" for The Arkham Collector in 1971, and has collected short stories in With Friends Like These . . . (coll 1977), its companion, . . . Who Needs Enemies? (coll 1984), and The Metrognome and Other Stories (coll 1990). ADF is best known, however, for a prolific and generally competent output of novels and novelizations.Several of his best books fit into a loose double sequence of novels set in a multifarious Galaxy dominated by the Humanx Commonwealth, a venue well suited as an arena for SPACE OPERAS and encounters with ALIEN races. The central sequence follows the life of young Flinx, an orphan with PSI POWERS and the friendship of a highly potent pet alien named Pip, and comprises (in order of internal chronology): For Love of Mother-Not (1983); a connected trilogy made up of ADF's first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang (1972), Orphan Star (1977) and The End of the Matter (1977); Bloodhype (1973); and Flinx in Flux (1988). A second, looser sequence consists of Nor Crystal Tears (1982); Midworld (1975); a connected trilogy made up of Icerigger (1974), Mission to Moulokin (1979) and The Deluge Drivers (1987), the three comprising his best work to date; Voyage to the City of the Dead (1984); and Sentenced to Prism (1985). Sometimes reminiscent of the earlier work of Poul ANDERSON, the sequence is expansive and colourful, though tending to melodrama and prone to the fable-like use of such sf and fantasy elements as ESP and dragons.Individual novels have tended more to a clear-headed commercial exploitation of various genre categories, though Cachalot (1980), whose whale-like aliens are of interest, The Man who Used the Universe (1983) and Cyber Way (1990) perhaps stand out.Of ADF's numerous novelizations, the most notable are possibly Dark Star * (1974), based on DARK STAR (1974), Star Wars * (1976), as by George LUCAS, the director of STAR WARS (1977), Alien * (1979), based on ALIEN (1979), Aliens: A Novelization * (1986), based on ALIENS (1986), and Alien FOSTER, GEORGE C(ECIL) (1893-? ) UK writer whose first novel of genre interest, The Lost Garden (1930), is a fantasy in which survivors of ATLANTIS experience world history up to the present. In Full Fathom Five (1930) prehistoric episodes are linked by REINCARNATION to scenes set in the present. Awakening (1932) subjects the contemporary (and the future) world to the perspective of a soldier awakening from suspended animation. Cats in the Coffee (1938), under the nom de plume Seaforth, presents through reincarnation a retrospective vision of prehistory, and We Band of Brothers (1939), also as by Seaforth, combines future- WAR events and elucidatory conversations between a man of the deep future and a man of the deep past. The Change (1963) is routine. In almost all his work, conventional plots are twisted to make room for perspectives on the nature of human history; in this sense, GCF illuminates a central strategy of the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE. [JC/PN]See also: IMMORTALITY. FOSTER, M(ICHAEL) A(NTHONY) (1939- ) US writer, former data-systems analyst and sequentially a Russian linguist and ICBM launch-crew commander to the US Air Force; he is also a semiprofessional photographer. After some poetry, published privately as Shards from Byzantium (coll 1969 chap) and The Vaseline Dreams of Hundifer Jones (coll 1970 chap), he began to publish sf with the ambitious Ler trilogy about a race of genetically created SUPERMEN. The Gameplayers of Zan (1977), a very long novel formally constructed on the model of an Elizabethan tragedy, describes a period of climactic tension between the ler and the rest of humanity, and is set on Earth. The Warriors of Dawn (1975), published first but set later, is a more conventional SPACE OPERA in which a human male and a ler female are forced to team up to try to solve a complexly ramifying problem of interstellar piracy. The Day of the Klesh (1979) brings the ler and the eponymous race of humans together on a planet where they must solve their differences. The books are slow in the telling, but impressively detailed in their construction of ler culture and language. The Morphodite sequence which followed comprises The Morphodite (1981), Transformer (1983) and Preserver (1985), and similarly uses devices of genetic manipulation to buttress complex plots, though in this case the shape-changing, revolution-fomenting protagonist dominates the tale as trickster and superman. Waves (1980) rather sluggishly recalls Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961) in a tale of political intrigue on a planet whose ocean is intelligent. The four novellas collected in Owl Time (coll 1985) are told in challengingly various modes, and derive strength from their mutual contrast. MAF's career to date could be seen as a prelude to the major book which should bring him the acclaim he merits. [JC]See also: GENETIC ENGINEERING; LIVING WORLDS; PLANETARY ROMANCE. FOSTER, RICHARD Kendell Foster CROSSEN. FOSTER, W(ALTER) BERT(RAM) (1869-1929) US author of two borderline sf novels, The Eve of War (1904) and The Lost Expedition (1905). [JC] FOUNDATION: THE REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION UK semi-academic journal, published by the SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION of North East London Polytechnic (now known as the University of East London) from Mar 1972, and more recently, since 1993 when the SFF moved, of the University of Liverpool, current, 61 numbers to summer 1994, 3 numbers a year. #1-#4 ed Charles BARREN, #5-#13 ed Peter NICHOLLS, #14-#19 ed Malcolm EDWARDS, #20-#36 ed David PRINGLE, #37 onwards ed Edward JAMES. Much of the journal's flavour has resulted from the work of long-running features editor Ian WATSON, who held that position from #10 (1976) to #51 (1991). The most influential reviews editors have perhaps been John CLUTE (#20-#47) followed by Colin GREENLAND (from #47). Other members of the editorial board have included Kenneth BULMER, George HAY and Christopher PRIEST. Under James's editorship the editorial address has been the University of York, where he teaches.F:TROSF has a distinctive flavour regarded by US readers as typically UK, though in fact some of its editors have been foreigners. After a shaky beginning, it soon became perhaps the liveliest and indeed the most critical of the big three critical journals - the others being EXTRAPOLATION in the USA and SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES in Canada - though lacking the academic authority of at least the latter. Since there is very little formal use of sf in UK universities, there is no academic base to provide a rigidly scholarly features section. The real strengths of F:TROSF have always been its book reviews and its willingness to publish articles about current sf; it has been weaker in theoretical and historical studies. Nevertheless, it has provided a platform for serious sf criticism in the UK. Its contributors - often professional writers of fiction rather than academics - have tended to be more aggressively judgmental, and more intent upon defining a critical canon for sf, than their politer US colleagues. All of this may explain why its readership appears to be less academic than that of the other scholarly journals, consisting more of fans and sf writers. The US scholar Gary K. WOLFE sees F:TROSF, not wholly unadmiringly (and only in part incorrectly), as partaking of "certain traditions of fan scholarship". From the beginning a feature of F:TROSF has been the Profession of Science Fiction series (45 to date) of autobiographical pieces by sf writers; a selection of Profession essays appeared later as The Profession of Science Fiction (anth 1992) ed Edward James and Maxim JAKUBOWSKI. The first 8 issues of F:TROSF were republished in book form as Foundation, Numbers 1 to 8: March 1972-March 1975 (1978) with intro by Peter Nicholls. [PN] 4D MAN (vt The Evil Force UK; vt Master of Terror US) Film (1959). Fairview/Universal. Coproduced and dir Irwin Shortess Yeaworth Jr, starring Robert Lansing, Lee Meriwether, James Congdon. Screenplay Theodore Simonson, Cy Chermak, from an idea by Jack H. Harris. 85 mins. Colour.A small, interesting film made by the same producer/director team, Jack H. Harris and Yeaworth, that had already made The BLOB (1958). Lansing plays a scientist who uses his brother's research on the amplification of brainwaves and finds that as a result he can interpenetrate with solid matter - walk through walls, etc. The unfortunate side-effect is that he draws on the lifeforce of others (an idea used again in LIFEFORCE [1985]), which renders them instantly dead of old age. There is a love triangle, and some brooding angst from Lansing, who oscillates between delight in his new power and guilt. [PN] FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE Film (1952). Hammer. Dir Terence Fisher, starring Barbara Payton, Stephen Murray, John Van Eyssen. Screenplay Paul TABORI, Fisher, based on The Four-Sided Triangle (1939 AMZ; exp 1949) by William F. TEMPLE. 81 mins, cut to 71 mins. B/w.A scientist builds a machine capable of duplicating human beings. He duplicates the woman he loves but who is in love with another man, only to have the duplicate, too, fall in love with that other man. This is a low-budget film and suffers from it; there appear to be no prints now in circulation. [JB] FOURTH DIMENSION DIMENSIONS. FOWLER, KAREN JOY (1950- ) US writer with degrees in political science and north Asian studies. She began publishing sf with "Recalling Cinderella" in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Vol I (anth 1985) ed Algis BUDRYS, and caused considerable stir in the sf field with the quality of the work assembled in her first collection, ARTIFICIAL THINGS (coll 1986), which helped gain her the 1987 JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer. Her short stories - later collections are Peripheral Vision (coll 1990 chap) and Letters from Home (anth 1991 UK), which contains separate tales by her, Pat CADIGAN and Pat MURPHY - gave a first and entirely deceptive appearance of reticence, but soon revealed steely ironies, an insistence on the essential solitude of her protagonists (which evoked FEMINIST arguments about alienation but did not dwell upon the specifics of oppression or male-female discord) and an urgent hilarity. Some stories, like "Face Values", are pure sf; others shift into fantasy or FABULATION, giving ambiguous cues as to any "proper" reading.This sure-footed refusal to give her readers much epistemological security - much sense that her worlds could be firmly apprehended - also governed the telling of KJF's first novel, the remarkable SARAH CANARY (1991), which - along with John FOWLES's A Maggot (1985) - may be the finest First Contact novel ( COMMUNICATIONS) yet written. A strange female figure - woman or alien, no one knows, or can even formulate the question - arrives in the state of Washington in 1873 and is dubbed Sarah Canary, because of the birdlike sounds she makes. In attempting to deal with her, the Chinese worker to whom she has attached herself is exposed to a long array of those living beings that the sciences of the 19th century have attempted to control through "knowledge": Indians, Blacks, the insane, immigrants, women, animals, artists, confidence men. Sarah Canary, who stands for them all in the indescribable melody of her Being, finally disappears, never having said a word. As an emblem of the enigma behind the idea of First Contact she is perhaps definitive. As a dramatization of the self-deluding imperialisms of knowledge, SARAH CANARY is equally convincing. [JC]Other work: The War of the Roses (1985 IASFM; 1991 chap).See also: INTERZONE; SOCIOLOGY; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. FOWLER, SYDNEY S. Fowler WRIGHT. FOWLES, JOHN (ROBERT) (1926- ) UK writer who remains perhaps most famous for his first novel, The Collector (1963), but whose second novel, The Magus (1965 US; rev 1977 UK), especially in the conciser revised version, more powerfully explores the labyrinths of obsession and manipulation underlying, in all of JF's work, the rigmaroles of daylight reality. In this novel a series of seemingly supernatural contrivances separates the unpleasant protagonist from his love and from any security, causing him to learn something about himself before happiness is allowed to reign; rational explanations in the end from the Daedalus-like magus do little to attenuate a sense of magic-realist entrapment. Of JF's other novels, A Maggot (1985) is sf. Set in the 18th century, it superlatively explores the epistemology of First Contact - the study of the possible nature of human PERCEPTIONS of something genuinely ALIEN, genuinely Other - by telling a version of the life-story of the mother of Ann Lee (1736-1784), historical founder of the Shaker religion; the woman's response to the insoluble knot of PERCEPTIONS visited upon her when she inadvertently stumbles upon some time travellers, possibly from Earth's future, is a literal seed-bed (she is pregnant at the time) for Enthusiasm. [JC]Other works: Mantissa (1982). FOX, GARDNER F(RANCIS) (1911-1986) US lawyer and author, who began writing in 1937 for DC COMICS, including SUPERMAN. Arguably his most important work was for COMICS: though it is claimed that he published at least 160 books under various names, this pales beside his 4000 or more comic-book stories; he created The Flash as well as the first SUPERHERO team, the Justice Society of America, in 1940. In the 1960s he was one of those responsible for reviving many of the superheroes from the 1940s and also created new characters, like The Atom and Adam Strange. He began publishing sf/fantasy in non-graphic form with "The Weirds of the Woodcarver" for Weird Tales in 1944. He used several pseudonyms at this time, including Jefferson Cooper, Jeffrey Gardner and James Kendricks, though not for sf. He was an active contributor to Planet Stories from 1945, and soon established a reputation for historical romances like The Borgia Blade (1953), not beginning to publish sf novels, either under his own name or under his later pseudonyms Rod Gray, Simon Majors and Bart Somers, until Five Weeks in a Balloon* ** (1962), which novelizes the film of the Jules VERNE novel. GFF's first sf novel proper is Escape Across the Cosmos (1964), in which a man fights a menace from another DIMENSION; it was plagiarized as Titans of the Universe in various 1978 editions, variously as by Brian James Royal, James Harvey and Moonchild. His best is probably The Arsenal of Miracles (1964 dos), which combines SPACE OPERA, GALACTIC EMPIRES and a romantically conceived hero who prefigures the interest in HEROIC FANTASY which dominated GFF's later output. His sf series are the two fantasy-like Alan Morgan adventures - Warrior of Llarn (1964) and Thief of Llarn (1966) - and, as by Bart Somers, the Commander Craig space operas: Beyond the Black Enigma (1965) and Abandon Galaxy! (1967). GFF was an efficient storyteller with no visible pretensions to significance or thematic originality. [JC/PN]Other works: The Hunter out of Time (1965); The Druid Stone (1967), as by Simon Majors; the Kothar series of heroic-fantasy novels, comprising Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman (coll of linked stories 1969), Kothar of the Magic Sword! (1969), Kothar and the Demon Queen (1969), Kothar and the Conjuror's Curse (1970) and Kothar and the Wizard Slayer (1970); Conehead (1973); the Kyrik heroic-fantasy series, comprising Kyrik: Warlock Warrior (1975), Kyrik Fights the Demon World (1975), Kyrik and the Wizard's Sword (1976) and Kyrik and the Lost Queen (1976); Carty (1977).As Rod Gray (house name): Of the soft-porn Lady from L.U.S.T. sequence, those by GFF and of some sf interest are The Poisoned Pussy (1969), Laid in the Future (1969), Blow my Mind (1970) and The Copulation Explosion (1970). FOX, SAMUEL MIDDLETON (1856-1941) UK writer whose sf novel, Our Own Pompeii: A Romance of Tomorrow (1887), a fairly mild-mannered SATIRE of high society, features a pleasure city on the Riviera which proves too expensive to run. [JC] FPCI FANTASY PUBLISHING COMPANY INC. F.P.1 ANTWORTET NICHT Film (1932). UFA. Dir Karl Hartl, starring Hans Albers, Sybille Schmitz, Paul Hartmann, Peter Lorre. Screenplay Walter Reisch, Kurt SIODMAK, based on F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht (1932) by Siodmak. 111 mins. B/w.F.P.1 has been described as being in the tradition of METROPOLIS (1926) and Die FRAU IM MOND (1929), but Karl Hartl was no Fritz LANG. It is a slow-moving film about the construction of a giant floating runway (Flugzeug Platform 1) to be moored in mid-Atlantic for refuelling transatlantic flights, but is actually more concerned with a tedious love triangle. The story is about an intrepid aviator who sees flight as a near-mystical experience, and about sabotage and noble renunciations - all pulp materials, but with none of the slickness or verve of similar Hollywood films of the period. At great expense a flying platform was actually built for the film, on the island of Oie. The same production team made GOLD (1934).An English version ( FP1 DOESN'T ANSWER) and a French one, starring Charles Boyer, were made of F.P.1 at the same time as the German version. [JB/PN] F.P.1 DOESN'T ANSWER Film (1932). UFA. Technical credits as for FP1 ANTWORTET NICHT, but starring Conrad Veidt, Jill Esmond and Leslie Fenton. 90 mins. B/w.This is the shorter English-language version of the German film, and was shot at the same time. The acting is better than in the German version. [PN] FRAME, JANET (PATTERSON) (1924- ) New Zealand writer , some of whose stories - especially those assembled in Snowman, Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (coll 1963 US) and You Are Entering the Human Heart (coll 1983) - are fantasy. The most intense of her several novels explore the world through the telling perceptions of protagonists categorized as psychiatrically disturbed, situations frequently described in terms that utilize the languages of the fantastic. Intensive Care (1970 US) is told in part through the eyes of a young woman defined as mentally deficient in a post- HOLOCAUST world where those so described are killed after being experimented upon. The Carpathians (1988 UK) is a fantasy set in an imaginary country. [JC] FRANCE The history of France's relationship with sf is one of long flirtation, marked through the centuries by episodic outbursts of passion and, in recent times, by an increasing shift from authorship to readership, from the active to the passive role, as more and more people become avid consumers of the US/UK sf tradition. A few remarkable French writers of sf have emerged, but, although the 1970s were an active period for French sf, no truly indigenous school of writing has yet taken shape.A quest for "great ancestors" in the corpus of French literature would be endless. Many texts-some vintage classics, some long-forgotten oddities-show that FANTASTIC VOYAGES, the search for UTOPIA, and speculation about other worlds and alien forms of society were constant preoccupations. People tend to overlook the fact that the last parts of Francois RABELAIS's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64; trans 1653-94), especially L'isle sonante ["The Ringing Island"] (1562), are clearly set in the future and almost constitute an early style of SPACE OPERA with their processing of foreign languages, customs and landscapes.One century later, interest in the otherworldly asserted itself in works such as CYRANO DE BERGERAC's Histoire comique contenant les etats et empires de la lune (1657; trans as A Voyage to the Moon 1659) and Bernard le Bovyer de FONTENELLE's Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans J. Glanvill as The Plurality of Worlds 1929), but it is in the 18th century that we encounter the most direct forerunner of sf in its modern sense, in the form of the conte philosophique, or philosophical tale. Conditions were then ideal for the emergence of something akin to sf: the Siecle des Lumieres was one of universal curiosity, of philosophical audacity and political revolution; it gave birth to all-encompassing spirits such as that of Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and saw the writing of the Encyclopedie (1751-2), which merged the two aspects of culture, literary and scientific, the divorce of which would be one of the main sources of the decline of French sf in our time.The conventions of the conte philosophique - which generally takes the shape of a fantastic voyage - are predecessors to those of sf: the voyage to the far island symbolizes what we now imagine in interplanetary travel, and the islanders themselves stand for what are now aliens, while the study of their civilizations serves as a mirror/criticism of our institutions. Conversely, the satire of French (= European) society as seen through foreign eyes was a device that had already been used by Charles Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his Lettres persanes ["Persian Letters"] (1721).The genre could be illustrated by numerous stories (Pierre VERSINS states that "at the beginning of the 18th century, at least one speculative work was published each year"), but among its landmarks were VOLTAIRE's Micromegas (Berlin 1750; France 1752), Louis-Sebastien MERCIER's L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771; trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772), RESTIF DE LA BRETONNE's La decouverte australe ["The Southern-Hemisphere Discovery"] (1781) and Giacomo CASANOVA di Seingalt's Isocameron (1788), an early story of travel to the centre of the Earth. Such was the vogue of speculation that in 1787 a publisher started a list of Voyages imaginaires which ran to 36 volumes and may be considered the first sf series ever.Perhaps the most significant sf figure of the early 19th century was Felix Bodin, whose Le Roman de l'avenir ["The Romance of the Future"] (1834) consists of a long theoretical discussion of the nature of futuristic fiction, this being a preface to a fragmentary or unfinished novel about a future, in which mechanized warfare appears. As Paul K. ALKON demonstrates in Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987), Bodin's book presents an aesthetic which - significantly for sf - refers not only to a genre which takes the future as its subject but to one that itself will exist only in the future. The remainder of the 19th century would seem to be entirely dominated by the formidable silhouette of Jules VERNE, but it was a very active period in other respects too, carrying on the elan of the preceding era. Scientific achievements and the Industrial Revolution gave birth to popular novels in the same way that philosophical turmoil had produced its share of contes. Verne himself stands apart because he was the first writer to be systematic about it and build his whole work according to a vast design, as described by his publisher Hetzel in 1867: "His aim is to sum up all knowledge gathered by modern science in the fields of geography, geology, physics, astronomy, and to remake, in his own attractive and picturesque way, the history of our Universe." From then to his death in 1905, Verne gave Hetzel the 64 books which make up his Voyages extraordinaires, subtitled "Voyages dans les mondes connus et inconnus" ["Voyages into the Known and Unknown Worlds"]. Jacques Van Herp (1923- ), who himself wrote a large number of works of CHILDREN'S SF as Michel Jansen, has argued that the huge success Verne enjoyed, basically among adolescents, drove serious critics and historians away from him, so that - in France anyway - one may trace back to Verne the lame academic quarrel about whether sf, or "anticipation", is high literature or not. Indeed, that question had never been raised before; it took a bourgeois system of education (see below) to institute class-struggle among books. Verne's work went the way of Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island: that of a sort of universal reputation which does not preclude underestimation or misunderstanding. Until recently, Verne was ignored by the universities, but fascinated such diverse minds as those of Raymond Roussel (who called him "le plus grand genie litteraire de tous les siecles" ["the greatest literary genius of all time"]), Michel BUTOR and Michel Foucault (1926-1984).Among Verne's contemporaries in the field, one should at least mention the astronomer Camille FLAMMARION and his Recits de l'infini (1872; trans as Stories of Infinity: Lumen - History of a Comet in Infinity 1874) and the novelist cum draftsman Albert ROBIDA, who was no less prolific than Verne, whom he parodied in his Voyages tres extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul (1879; for book publication ROBIDA) which purportedly took their hero "into all the countries known and even unknown to Mr Jules Verne". Robida proved himself a visionary as well as a humorist in his Le vingtieme siecle ["The Twentieth Century"] (1882), La vie electrique ["The Electric Life"] (1883) and "La guerre au vingtieme siecle" ["War in the 20th Century"] (La caricature 1883).By the turn of the century, however, the one name Verne had to contend with was that of J.H. ROSNY aine, a writer who possibly deserves as much consideration. The Rosnys, two brothers of Belgian extraction, started together a writing career that was eventually to win them seats in the Academie Goncourt, but we are concerned only with the numerous stories and the 17 novels of Rosny aine (the elder brother), which run from the prehistoric, such as La guerre du feu ["The War of Fire"] (1909), through the cataclysmic La mort de la terre ["Death of the Earth"] (1910) to the futuristic Les navigateurs de l'infini ["Navigators of the Infinite"] (1925). Rosny aine consistently brought to the field, besides a solid scientific culture, a breadth of vision at times worthy of Olaf STAPLEDON.The period ranging from the 1880s to the 1930s, largely predating the US boom of the 1920s, was the true golden age of French sf: we might call it France's pulp era. Not that there ever existed any specific sf magazines, but wide-circulation periodicals such as Journal des voyages and La science illustree - and, later, Je sais tout, L'Intrepide and the very important Sciences et voyages - regularly ran stories and serialized novels of "anticipation". Sf was thus lent a degree of respectability by being introduced as an extension of travel and adventure stories. In the general title given to his work, Jules Verne had proceeded similarly from "known" to "unknown" worlds.Apart from isolated works by nonspecialists such as L'Eve future (1886; trans as The Eve of the Future 1981 US; new trans as Tomorrow's Eve 1982 US) by VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM, L'ile des pingouins (1908; trans as Penguin Island 1909) by Anatole FRANCE and Le Napus, fleau de l'an 2227 ["The 'Disappearance': Scourge of the Year 2227"] (1927) by Leon Daudet (1868-1942), this period gave birth to a host of popular writers: Paul d'Ivoi, Louis BOUSSENARD, then Gustave Le Rouge, Jean de La Hire, Andre Couvreur, Jose Moselli, Rene Thevenin, etc. All were not of equal worth, but three names are outstanding: Maurice RENARD, author of the amazing Le docteur Lerne (1908; trans as New Bodies for Old 1923), which he dedicated to H.G. WELLS; Jacques SPITZ, whose best novel was L'oeil du purgatoire ["The Eye of Purgatory"] (1945) and whose earlier L'agonie du globe (1935; trans as Save the Earth 1936) was given a UK edition; and Regis Messac (1893-1943), whose Quinzinzinzili (1935) and La cite des asphyxies ["City of the Suffocated"] (1934) exhibit a sinister mood and grim humour that deserve to gain him a new audience today.WWII put an end to this thriving period, and during the 1940s only one writer of note appeared: Rene BARJAVEL, with Ravage (1943; trans as Ashes, Ashes 1967) and Le voyageur imprudent (1944; trans as Future Times Three 1971). At the end of WWII two factors were to bear heavily on the future of sf in France. The first was the growing separation, at school, in the universities and in all thinking circles, between les litteraires and les scientifiques. This made for a lack of curiosity on the part of aspiring novelists about science and its possible effects on the shapes of our lives, and drove many talents away from the genre, which was definitely viewed as teenager-fodder. France had, as it were, ceased to dream about its own future - and about the future generally. Second, whatever interest in these matters existed was satisfied from another source, the USA. In the years following WWII the French public discovered all at once jazz, US films, thrillers and the US GOLDEN AGE OF SF. One key personality of the period was Boris VIAN, novelist, songwriter, film buff and jazz musician, who translated both Raymond Chandler and A.E. VAN VOGT. This was the time of the creation of Le club des savanturiers by Michel Pilotin, Vian, Raymond Queneau and Audiberti. In 1951, Queneau wrote an introductory essay in Critique: "Un nouveau genre litteraire: les sciences-fictions" ["A New Literary Genre: SF"], followed two years later by Michel Butor, with "La crise de croissance de la science-fiction" (1953 Cahiers du Sud; trans as "SF: The Crisis of its Growth", Partisan Review 1967; reprinted in SF: The Other Side of Realism [anth 1971] ed T. CLARESON).Sf was again fashionable but mainly in translated form. Between 1951 and 1964, the Rayon fantastique series published 119 titles, mostly US; it was followed in 1954 by Presence du Futur, which still exists today. By the end of the decade some French names were appearing on the list of the former (Francis Carsac [pseudonym of Francois Bordes (1919-1977)], Philippe CURVAL and Albert Higon, pseudonym of Michel Jeury [1934- ]) and the latter (Jacques STERNBERG, Jean Hougron), but for the most part French authors were published, often under pseudonyms, in the less prestigious Fleuve noir series, created in 1951. The best of these were Stefan WUL, B.R. Bruss (Roger Blondel), Kurt Steiner (Andre Ruellan) and Gilles d'Argyre (Gerard KLEIN).In 1953 Editions Opta launched the French editions of Gal and FSF, Galaxie and Fiction, whose contents differ notably from those of their US models. These two would remain for many years the principal outlet for US stories and a springboard for new French talents, including critics. But such were few and far between. The initial impetus given by the discovery of US sf in the 1950s slowed down during the following decade. One magazine which devoted more space to indigenous authors, Satellite, had a brief life. Among the new writers, Michel Demuth, Alain Doremieux and Gerard Klein were soon absorbed by editorial responsibilities and their output consequently became irregular.The most personal voice during this period and the succeeding years has been that of Philippe Curval who, from Le ressac de l'espace ["The Breakers of Space"] (1962) through Cette chere humanite ["This Dear Humanity"] (1976), has consistently maintained a high standard while never imitating the US model. Beside him we should again mention Michel Jeury, who resumed writing (under his own name) with Le temps incertain (1973; trans Maxim Jakubowski as Chronolysis 1980 US), and Daniel Drode (1932-1984), whose only novel was Surface de la planete ["Surface of the Planet"] (1959). Mainstream writers occasionally tackled sf: Pierre BOULLE with La planete des singes (1963; trans as Planet of the Apes 1963; vt Monkey Planet UK); Robert MERLE with Un animal doue de raison (1967; trans as The Day of the Dolphin 1969) and Malevil (1972; trans 1974); and Claude Ollier, an adept of the nouveau roman, with La vie sur Epsilon ["Life on Epsilon"] (1972).In the 1970s the situation underwent new changes, once more due to a definite influence: that of the UK NEW WAVE and in particular post- NEW-WORLDS sf. J.G. BALLARD's later work, along with that of such US writers as Thomas M. DISCH, Harlan ELLISON, Norman SPINRAD and, above all, Philip K. DICK, had a tremendous impact on the new generation of readers who lived through the 1968 student uprising and saw the possibilities of making powerful political statements in speculative form. Several young authors who began writing in the mid-1960s (Daniel WALTHER, Jean-Pierre Andrevon, Jean-Pierre Hubert) readily took that route, and were followed by a batch of newcomers, with Dominique Douay, Pierre Pelot and Philippe Goy the best among them.Nevertheless, the effervescence of the late 1970s did not survive into the 1980s. Lack of enthusiasm on the part of the public? Overabundance of books? Difficulties linked to general publishing problems? It was the beginning of a critical period in which the number of sf imprints, about 40 during the late 1970s, diminished to a half-dozen. The so-called "New French SF", sometimes inordinately politicized, was the first victim of this crisis. Partly because of its excesses, readers and editors grew weary of French sf authors, who then tried to explore different paths and attract recognition through other means. Some, mostly newcomers, reacted by turning to a form-oriented sf - that is, to a greater preoccupation with style, poetry and experimental writing (Emmanuel Jouanne, Antoine Volodine) - to the point where they sometimes forgot the true nature of the genre. Others were tempted into expressing their personal universes, often powerfully fantastic in kind. Among these were Jean-Marc Ligny, Jacques Barberi, Francis Berthelot and particularly Serge Brussolo who, in less than 10 years, made his mark with some 40 novels - including such definite masterpieces as Aussi lourd que le vent ["As Heavy as the Wind"] (1981), Carnaval de fer ["Iron Carnival"] (1983) and La nuit du bombardier ["Night of the Bomber"] (1989) - and became the most original and most popular sf writer of his generation. Finally, a third category of authors put their craft into the service of a "neo-classical" sf which invited the reader to reflect upon contemporary issues ( ECOLOGY, the media, COMPUTERS, genetics, cultural intermingling) though without giving up the traditional lures of exoticism and adventure. They include G.-J. Arnaud and his long series La compagnie des glaces ["The Ice Company"], which has run since 1981, Bernard Simonay with Phenix (1986) and Joel Houssin with Les Vautours ["The Vultures"] (1986) and Argentine (1989), all books which have found a large audience and won awards.Today French sf shows a paradoxical face: it includes many talented writers, usually well detached from the UK-US influence, whether long-established authors or newcomers to the genre such as Richard Canal, Pierre Stolze, Raymond Milesi and Colette Fayard. But, on the other hand, the dwindling of publishing imprints, magazines and columns - or their outright disappearance (Fiction ceased in 1989) - gives the unfortunate impression that the domain is definitely in peril. Thus, the best French authors - notably those with a long career behind them - are now inclined to abandon sf and turn to horror ( HORROR IN SF) which, courtesy of Stephen KING, has become increasingly popular (Andrevon, Brussolo), or to mainstream literature (Sternberg, Jeury, Pelot, Andrevon, Curval, Volodine), or to screenplays (Ruellan, Pelot, Houssin), a far more lucrative field.One would think that the existence of an active, passionate FANDOM - thanks to which the French sf milieu has been holding its own CONVENTIONS since 1974 - would have given a boost to the national production, but such is not the case. French fandom remains self-centred, and is more devoted to its own byzantine arguments than to the task of working efficiently to enlarge sf's public recognition. In other words, fans complain about their preferred literature being locked up in a ghetto, but never do anything really helpful to change that. Only a handful of critics - sometimes translators, editors or writers themselves (Curval, Jeury, Klein) - have tried and are still trying to publish in mainstream magazines or newspapers regular columns or interviews meant to defend and exemplify sf (French or not) to the general public, who are often ill informed about the genre. [RL/JCh]Further reading: Encyclopedie de l'utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972 Switzerland) by Pierre Versins; Histoire de la science-fiction moderne (1973) by Jacques SADOUL; Panorama de la science-fiction (1973 Belgium) by Jacques Van Herp; the preface by Gerard KLEIN to Sur l'autre face du monde & autres romans scientifiques de "Science et voyages" (anth 1973) ed A. Valerie; Malaise dans la science-fiction (1977) by Klein; also useful are 4 anthologies of French sf short stories, Les Mondes francs, L'Hexagone hallucine, La Frontiere eclatee and Les Mosaiques du temps (1988-90) ed Klein, Ellen Herzfeld and Dominique Martel. FRANCE, ANATOLE Working name of Anatole-Francois Thibault (1844-1924), French writer active from the early 1860s until his death. His essayistic "pagan" SATIRES seem perhaps less relevant now than formerly, their amused rationality failing to bite with sufficient savagery into targets like official religion and sexual prudery. Of sf interest are Sur la pierre blanche (1905; trans Charles E. Roche as The White Stone 1910), in which a group of intellectuals prognosticates a White Peril (the Yellow races being at risk) and the rise of Socialism; and L'ile des pingouins (1908; trans A.W. Evans as Penguin Island 1909 UK), in which humanity's evolutionary course is allegorized satirically through the transformation into humans - after they have been baptised in error - of a race of penguins, who repeat human history. In La revolte des anges (1914; trans Mrs Wilfrid Jackson as The Revolt of the Angels 1914 UK), a fantasy and AF's finest novel, an angel - corrupted by the world of books - realizes that his fallen brethren were in the right. AF won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. [JC]Other works: Thais (1890; trans, almost certainly by Charles Carrington, 1901 France); L'Etui de Nacre (coll 1892; trans Henry Pene du Bois as Tales from a Mother-of-Pearl Casket 1896 US; vt Mother of Pearl 1908 UK); Le Puits de Sainte Clare (coll 1895; trans, almost certainly by Charles Carrington, as The Well of St Clare 1903 France); Honey-Bee (trans Mrs John Lane 1911 UK), a tale first published with other fantasies in Balthazar (coll 1889; trans Mrs John Lane 1909 UK); Les Sept Femmes de la Barbe-Bleu, et autres contes merveilleux (coll 1909; trans Mrs D.B. Stewart as The Seven Wives of Bluebeard, and Other Marvellous Tales 1920 UK).See also: ECONOMICS; FRANCE; UTOPIAS. FRANCES, STEPHEN (DANIEL) (1917-1989) UK publisher and pulp writer who lived in Spain from the early 1950s. In the mid-1940s he founded his own publishing company, Pendulum Publications, which released a variety of genre fiction, including sf. The editor of his sf line, Frank ARNOLD, introduced SDF to John CARNELL, a meeting that led to the birth of NEW WORLDS in 1946; but after only 3 issues the company was sold (and liquidated).SDF then founded his own self-named company. For it he penned a series of fast-moving US-style thrillers as by Hank JANSON; they achieved remarkable success at the time. Also for it he created the house name Astron DEL MARTIA (which see), but soon sold the name to Gaywood Press to help finance his move to Spain. Later he wrote three sf novels as by Hank Janson: The Unseen Assassin (1953), a routine tale in which an alien disease threatens to wipe out humanity, Tomorrow and a Day (1955), a stronger post- HOLOCAUST tale, and One Against Time (1956 as by Janson; 1969 as by Del Martia), a TIME-TRAVEL tale pitting a mathematician against the World Council from a future threatened by his genius. SDF's later novel, The Disorientated Man (1966; vt Scream and Scream Again 1967 US) as by Peter SAXON, a mad- SCIENTIST tale filmed in 1969 as SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN, was heavily revised by W. Howard BAKER. [SH]About the author: The Trials of Hank Janson (1991) by Stephen HOLLAND. FRANCHISE SHARECROP. FRANCIS, RICHARD H. Working name of UK author and academic Richard Francis (1945- ), who added a fictitious "H" to distinguish himself from Dick Francis, the thriller writer. RHF's first novel, Blackpool Vanishes (1979), tells the quirky, extremely English story of what happens when microscopic ALIENS kidnap the town of Blackpool. In Whispering Gallery (1984) the discovery of a "missing link" between bacteria and viruses becomes complicated when it turns out that the new strain can serve - defectively - as a weapon, and - all too efficiently - as a fuel.Swansong (1986) is a mildly fantastic SATIRE on Margaret Thatcher's UK, the Falklands War and the brutally unexpected disasters of both personal and political history. [NT]See also: UFOS. FRANK, PAT (HARRY HART) (1907-1964) US journalist and author; a government official during WWII, he later served with the UN. Though his three sf novels are well known within the field, PF was not generally identified as an sf author. His first novel, Mr Adam (1946), exploits the fears of contamination felt in the USA after Hiroshima. All men but one are sterilized by a nuclear DISASTER; the experiences of the sole fertile male are rather feebly rendered as comical, providing grounds for a SATIRE on government procedures. Forbidden Area (1956; vt Seven Days to Never 1957 UK) also deals - more grimly - with the atomic question, in a thriller plot involving sabotage and near- HOLOCAUST. In his most famous novel, Alas, Babylon (1959), the disaster is again nuclear, but this time it is not averted. In a part of Florida that has survived the holocaust, the inhabitants of a small town manage, perhaps rather implausibly, to cope ( PASTORAL; ROBINSONADE) and modestly to flourish; domestic verisimilitude and apocalypse mingle here attractively, and the book was both made into a play and televised. PF's work draws its clear emotional force from the deep fears of nuclear devastation many Americans suffered, with some cause, during the 1950s. [JC] FRANKAU, GILBERT (1884-1952) UK writer known mainly for his work outside the sf field, most notably his Byronesque verse novel One of Us (1912) and dozens of popular romances. The Seeds of Enchantment (1921) is a lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) fantasy which features contrasting UTOPIAS in the wilds of Indochina. His posthumous sf novel, Unborn Tomorrow: A Last Story (1953), depicts a 50th-century Roman Catholic world where a beam which destroys all explosives has enforced a happy return to a pre-industrial lifestyle. [JC]Other work: Son of the Morning (1949). FRANKE, HERBERT W(ERNER) (1927- ) Austrian-born writer and scientist who, after receiving a doctorate in Vienna in 1950, moved to Munich, where he taught cybernetic aesthetics at the University of Munich. After publishing considerable nonfiction in the 1950s, mostly on either speleology or computer graphics, he also began publishing sf, at first speculative short stories like those assembled in Der grune Komet ["The Green Comet"] (coll 1960), Fahrt zum Licht: Utopische Kurzgeschichten ["Journey to Light: Utopian Short Stories"] (coll 1963), Einsteins Erben ["Einstein's Heirs"] (coll 1972) and Zarathustra kehrt zuruck ["Zarathustra Returns"] (coll 1977). He has also published several novels beginning with Das Gedankennetz (1961; trans Christine Priest as The Mind Net 1974 US). Der Orchideenkafig (1961; trans Christine Priest as The Orchid Cage 1973 US) complexly depicts, in HWF's typically speculative, somewhat dry manner, the profound transformative effects of a mysterious planet on its human explorers. Zone Null (1970; trans 1974 US) sets up between a future Free World and an apparently defeated and deserted Zone Null a metaphysical questioning of the true aims of society and of the intermingled values of both opposed sides. In Transpluto (1982), which is typical of his later work, a mysterious planet hornswoggles a team of Earthmen, keeping them from leaving the Solar System. HWF is one of the first contemporary German sf writers whose work ranks with that in English and other European languages. [JC]Other works: Die Glasfalle ["The Glass Trap"] (1961); Die Stahlwuste ["The Steel Desert"] (1962); Planet der Verlorenen ["Planet of the Lost"] (1963) as by Sergius Both; Der Elfenbeinturm ["The Ivory Tower"] (1965); Ypsilon Minus (1976); Ein Kyborg namens Joe ["A Cyborg Named Joe"] (coll 1978); Sirius Transit (1979) as by Sergius Both;Schule fur Ubermenschen ["School for Supermen"] (1980); Paradies 3000 ["Paradise 3000"] (coll1981); Keine Spur vom Leben ["No Trace of Life"] (coll 1982), collecting radio plays; Die Kalte des Weltraums ["The Coldness of Space"] (1982); Tod eines Unsterblichen ["Death of an Immortal"] (1982); Endzeit ["End of Time"] (1985); Der Atem der Sonne ["The Breath of the Sun"] (1986); Zentrum der Milchstrasse ["The Centre of the Milky Way"] (1990); Spiegel der Gedanken ["Mirror of Thought"] (coll 1990).See also: AUSTRIA; GERMANY. FRANKENHEIMER, JOHN (1930- ) US film director. A graduate of the 1950s school of live tv drama, JF first attracted attention as a film-maker with melodramas centred on youth and social issues: The Young Stranger (1956), The Young Savages (1961), All Fall Down (1961) and The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). However, in his direction of The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), Seven Days in May (1964) and SECONDS (1966), all based on successful novels, JF revealed a distinctive fantastic vision, rooted in the realities of the USA of the 1950s and 1960s, which would be a great influence on the 1970s run of post-Watergate conspiracy movies, like Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) and William Richert's Winter Kills (1979). Seven Days in May, in which the USA is threatened by a military coup, and The Manchurian Candidate are political fantasies focusing on the precariousness of the presidency, while Seconds, one of the scariest films of the 1960s, is a nightmare about rejuvenation. These exercises in unease are confidently shot in black-and-white with the Expressionist imagination of a top-drawer TWILIGHT ZONE episode, and feature a brilliant oddball casting of his stars. JF's films at this stage are a vision of a grey-suited corporate USA gone wrong, with recurrent themes of brainwashing, surveillance, assassination and Kafkaesque bureaucracies, many of which returned in his still-underrated comic-book gangster fantasy 99 & 44/100% Dead (1974; vt Call Harry Crown) and the large-scale terrorist thriller Black Sunday (1977). He had a commercial success with The French Connection II (1975), but his return to sf with PROPHECY (1979), a hokey, expensive MONSTER MOVIE, was a major disappointment, and his more recent films have tended to be bland adaptations of best-selling thrillers. [KN]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA. FRANKENSTEIN Film (1931). Universal. Dir James Whale, starring Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, Edward van Sloan, Dwight Frye. Screenplay Garrett Fort, Robert Florey, Francis Edward Faragoh, based on an adaptation by Florey and John L. Balderston of the play by Peggy Webling, based in turn on Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary SHELLEY. 71 mins. B/w.This remains the most famous of the Frankenstein films, although it was not the first. (The Edison Company made a 16min version in 1910; it was dir J. Searle Dawley and starred Charles Ogle as the Monster. A second version, also US, was the 70min Life without Soul in 1915, dir Joseph W. Smiley.) Dr Frankenstein is a SCIENTIST who builds an artificial man using parts from stolen bodies. He succeeds, with the aid of an electrical storm, in bringing the creature to life but, because his assistant has provided the brain of a criminal rather than that of a "normal" man (a clumsy plot device which has nothing to do with Shelley's novel), the creation proves difficult to control. Eventually the FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER escapes, accidentally kills a small girl, and is pursued and apparently slain by angry villagers (originally the Monster killed Frankenstein, too, but the studio substituted a happy ending).The film remains a semi-classic today. With his atmospheric lighting, smooth tracking shots and numerous low-angle shots that were never obtrusive but made effective use of the high-ceilinged sets - particularly Frankenstein's laboratory - Whale succeeded in making a HORROR film of some grandeur, with an undertone of ironic humour. Much of the credit must go to Karloff for his fine (unspeaking) performance as the pathetic Monster, considerably helped by Jack Pierce's famous make-up; Karloff's success here doomed him to horror roles for the rest of his life.There have been numerous sequels and remakes. The sequel BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), also dir Whale, is the best film he ever made. Other, increasingly awful, sequels from Universal were Son of Frankenstein (1939), Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), House of Frankenstein (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). In 1957 the UK company Hammer Films remade the original, calling it Curse of Frankenstein (vt Birth of Frankenstein), and then made The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1966), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), ending with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973). Five of these were dir Terence Fisher, and nearly all featured Peter Cushing's interestingly tense and upright performance as Baron von Frankenstein. Andy Warhol produced in Italy a 3-D SPLATTER-MOVIE pornographic version (remarkably tasteless on all counts) dir Paul Morrissey (or possibly an uncredited Antonio Margheriti): Carne per Frankenstein (1973; vt Flesh for Frankenstein; vt Andy Warhol's Frankenstein). A successful parody/homage movie was Young Frankenstein (1974), dir Mel Brooks. Other versions of the story, mostly exploitation films, were made in Italy and Spain. Two more US titles are Frankenstein 1970 (1958), dir Howard W. Koch and starring an ageing Boris Karloff, and Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965; vt Mars Invades Puerto Rico), which is not about Frankenstein at all. There are many more.An interesting attempt to recreate Mary Shelley's original novel, including its finale in the Arctic (all previous films had changed the story), is the 3-hour made-for-tv film Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), Universal/NBC, dir Jack Smight, from a script by Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, starring James Mason, David McCallum and Michael Sarrazin. It was theatrically released, cut to 123 mins. The teleplay was published as Frankenstein: The True Story * (1973), by Isherwood and Bachardy. FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (1990) is based on the 1973 RECURSIVE SF book by Brian ALDISS, but it does incorporate much of Shelley's original, including interesting Arctic scenes. Another tv movie version, made for cable tv, and moderately true to the book, though not very interestingly so, is Frankenstein (1993), 150 mins, dir David Wickes, with Randy Quaid as the creature. By far the most distinguished of any version from the last two decades of the 20th century is MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (1994), dir Kenneth Branagh, which is sensitive to the nature of the original yet prepared to use somewhat more modern metaphors to illuminate it, but even this is an uneven work.A book about versions of the story is Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present (1990) by Steven Earl Forry. [JB/PN]See also: GOTHIC SF; MONSTER MOVIES; SEX. FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER The term is in general use, not only in sf TERMINOLOGY but in common parlance, to mean a MONSTER that ultimately turns and rends its irresponsible creator. Note that in the original novel Frankenstein was the name of the creator and not of the monster, though in popular usage it is often assumed that the monster itself is Frankenstein. In critical talk, Frankenstein is often equated with Prometheus and Dr Faustus, two other legendary figures who were guilty of hubris in their quest for knowledge, and struck down. [PN]See also: FRANKENSTEIN; HORROR IN SF; MONSTER MOVIES; Mary SHELLEY. FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY FRANKENSTEIN. FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND (vt Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound) Film (1990). Warner Brothers. Dir Roger CORMAN, starring John Hurt, Raul Julia, Bridget Fonda, Nick Brimble, Katherine Rabett, Jason Patric, Michael Hutchence. Screenplay Corman, F.X. Feeney, based on Frankenstein Unbound (1973) by Brian W. ALDISS. 85 mins. Colour.This philosophical (about the dangers of the Promethean impulse) TIME-TRAVEL horror/fantasy was the first film directed by Corman for 20 years. A 21st-century scientist (Hurt) is time-warped into 19th-century Switzerland. On one side of Lake Geneva the Byron/Shelley menage is living; on the other the plot of Mary SHELLEY's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is being played out. Hurt gets involved with both sets of characters and winds up whisking MONSTER and maker off to an ice-age future for a splattery plot resolution, laced with conservative lectures about the evils of science. Some of the plentiful laughs may be intended, given that Aldiss's playful novel is in part a comedy, though Fonda is ridiculous as the dainty but promiscuous Mary. There are some cheapskate effects, but Raul Julia is good as the mad visionary; the angry-at-the-world FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER (Brimble) comes with impressive details like scarred eyeballs; and the GOTHIC horror set-pieces are directed with unselfconscious panache. [KN] FRANKLIN, EDGAR Working name used for his publications by US writer Edgar Franklin Stearns (1879-1958), whose Mr Hawkins' Humorous Inventions (coll of linked stories 1904), all reprinted from The ARGOSY , features the eponymous inventor/scientist comically failing to make a series of devices, such as the pumpless pump, work properly; the series continued to 1915 in various of the Frank A. MUNSEY magazines. [JC]See also: HUMOUR. FRANKLIN, H(OWARD) BRUCE (1934- ) US critic, John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers. In 1961 HBF gave at Stanford one of the earliest university courses in sf in the USA. In 1972 he was dismissed by Stanford for giving speeches protesting the university's involvement in the Vietnam War - a case well known to those interested in questions of academic freedom. His Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (anth 1966; rev 1968; exp and rev 1978) has been one of the most influential of sf ANTHOLOGIES, in drawing attention to the sheer volume of 19th-century sf. A later HBF anthology, containing sf about nuclear weapons, is Countdown to Midnight (anth 1984). HBF's two other books about sf are Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980) and War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988). The former relates HEINLEIN's career to contemporary US history from a Marxist perspective; the latter is a pungent and important study about the US preoccupation with super- WEAPONS in fact and fiction, and the way in which the fact has been influenced by the fiction. HBF has published many other critical articles on sf and is among the genre's most respected commentators. He received the PILGRIM AWARD in 1983. He has been a consulting editor of SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES since its inception. [PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; SF IN THE CLASSROOM; WAR. FRANKOWSKI, LEO A. (1943- ) US writer known principally for his ALTERNATE-WORLD series, the Adventures of Conrad Stargard: The Cross-Time Engineer (1986), The High-Tech Knight (1989), The Radiant Warrior (1989), The Flying Warlord (1989) and Lord Conrad's Lady (1990), with further volumes projected. The series features a Polish-US engineer, Stargard, who in the first volume is transported to medieval Poland via TIME TRAVEL. He settles down quite happily to the task of reshaping his native land into a country capable of surviving the next perilous decades, being overseen all the while by the time-travellers who have mistakenly conveyed him there. By changing the technology of medieval Poland, Stargard is of course changing timelines - in perfectly orthodox sf-adventure fashion - but the author's clear indifference to the plotting rigours expected in tales of this sort increasingly detracts from the flow of the story. Copernick's Rebellion (1987) deals with GENETIC ENGINEERING in a NEAR-FUTURE Polish setting, where LAF's inability to create women (though he is strong on breasts) is seriously irritating. [JC] FRANK READE LIBRARY US DIME-NOVEL SF series, BEDSHEET size. 191 issues (#188-#191 are reprints of #1-#4) 24 Sep 1892-8 Aug 1898, weekly to 8 June 1894 (#82), biweekly from then on. Cost 5cents. Published by Frank Tousey, Publisher, New York. (Partial reissue 1902-4, partial UK reprint.) All issues were printed on very poor paper and seldom survive in good condition; the 1902-4 reissue, with coloured covers, is sometimes considered more desirable than the first printing.This was the earliest serial publication devoted solely to sf, with more issues than all of Hugo GERNSBACK's sf magazines put together, each containing a single or a half story about Frank Reade (4 stories) or Frank Reade, Jr. (179 stories). All but the last were attributed to"NONAME" on their appearance in the FRL. About one-quarter of the stories were reprints from other Tousey BOYS' PAPERS (The Boys of New York, The Five Cent Wide Awake Library, Happy Days); the remainder were originals. As a whole, they comprise the most significant US dime-novel series, and in their exuberance (and stereotyped action), their humour (and their racism), their inventiveness (and the merciless repetition of similar inventions and WEAPONS), they represent the best and worst of the tradition.It is impossible to attain final bibliographical certainty about a series of this sort, but E.F. BLEILER's The Frank Reade Library (omni 10 vols 1979-86), which reprints the entire sequence, casts as much light as can ever be hoped for. It is not known, for instance, how many authors wrote as "Noname", a house pseudonym used for mysteries and Westerns as well as sf, though it is certain that the first Frank Reade story - Frank Reade and his Steam Man of the Plains (1876 The Boys of New York as by Harry Enton; 1892 as Frank Reade Library #12 as by "Noname") - was by Harold Cohen (1854-1927), who normally wrote as Enton. The tale was almost certainly commissioned by Frank Tousey in emulation of Edward S. ELLIS's The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868). Three more Frank Reade episodes followed (the first two written by Cohen), all involving steam-driven TRANSPORTATION devices whose main use (it is one of the less attractive features of the sequence, many of whose episodes were set in the US West) seemed to be that of slaughtering large numbers of Native Americans.In 1882, Frank Reade, Jr., son of Frank Reade, took over the action, beginning with Frank Reade, Jr., and his Steam Wonder (1882 The Boys of New York; 1893 as Frank Reade Libary #20). The popularity of these stories presumably inspired Tousey to institute The Frank Reade Library itself in 1892. The first 50 issues or so generally reprinted tales from 1880s Tousey magazines; the remaining issues, beginning 1893, were mostly original titles. It is probable that most of the Frank Reade, Jr. stories were written by Luis SENARENS, and en masse they suffered visibly from this hugely prolific author's carelessness, cheap jingoism, racist stereotyping and lackadaisical plotting. But, tedious or not, the sequence managed to make use of most of the sf venues and devices available at the close of the 19th century; in particular, airships and submarines and various other means of TRANSPORTATION - which served simultaneously as devastating weapons and means of near-magical travel ( EDISONADE) - almost always featured prominently in the adventures of the indefatigable boy inventor. Significant issues include #48, Frank Reade, Jr., Exploring a River of Mystery (1890 Five Cent Wide Awake Library; 1893), not by Senarens, which has fantastic geography and travels in Africa and is based on Henry Stanley's books or newspaper dispatches, and #133: The Island in the Air (1896), probably by Senarens, perhaps the first consideration of Roraima (in British Guiana) as a LOST WORLD, almost certainly a source for The Lost World (1912) by A. Conan DOYLE. More typical, however, is the long episodic novel Frank Reade, Jr., and his Queen Clipper of the Clouds (1889 The Boys of New York; 1893) by Senarens.The Frank Reade Library, however, does not contain all the adventures of the inventive Reade family. There are at least two uncollected stories about Frank Reade, Jr. and one about Frank Reade (Sr.). The last, Franke Reade, the Inventor, Chasing the James Boys with his Steam Team (1890), stands apart from the series and is the only Frank Reade story not attributed to "Noname". The third member of the Reade family, Frank Reade, III, stars in Young Frank Reade and his Electric Air Ship (1899) and perhaps in other unlocated stories. [EFB/JC] FRASER, Sir RONALD (ARTHUR) (1888-1974) UK writer and civil servant. Most of his work, like his first novel, The Flying Draper (1924; rev 1931), utilizes fantasy or sf devices - in the initial case self-levitation - to create allegorical or philosophical arguments; the unmistakably Wellsian draper, for instance, finds that the ability to fly enforces "higher" thoughts. In Flower Phantoms (1926) an orchid responds to the protagonist's nubility by showing her the secrets of sex. In Beetle's Career (1951), which is sf, a super-weapon is shown to have beneficial side-effects. In the Venus quartet - A Visit from Venus (1958), Jupiter in the Chair (1958), Trout's Testament (1960) and City of the Sun (1961) - various inhabitants of the Solar System confer about a number of mildly pressing topics. In an elegant, generally painless manner, RF concentrated throughout his career on novels of controlled wit, mild SATIRE and admissible sentiment; only occasionally would these entertainments move into the darker regions. [JC]Other works: Landscape with Figures (1925), an oriental fantasy; Miss Lucifer (1939); The Fiery Gate (1943); Sun in Scorpio (1949); A Work of Imagination: (The Pen - the Brush - the Well) (1974), a novel of occultism.See also: PSYCHOLOGY. FRATZ, D(ONALD) DOUGLAS (1952- ) US editor who founded the energetic sf news and reviews journal THRUST in 1973, renaming it Quantum with #36 (1990), and remaining its editor and (from #5) its publisher until the double issue #43/44, when he voluntarily terminated the journal by merging it with SCIENCE FICTION EYE. [JC] FRAU IM MOND, DIE (vt By Rocket to the Moon; vt The Girl in the Moon; vt The Woman in the Moon) Film (1929). UFA. Dir Fritz LANG, starring Gerda Maurus, Willy Fritsch, Gustav von Wangenheim, Fritz Rasp, Klaus Pohl. Screenplay Lang, Thea VON HARBOU, based on Frau im Mond (1928; trans as The Girl in the Moon 1930 UK; cut vt The Rocket to the Moon 1930 US) by von Harbou. 156 mins, cut to 107 mins, cut to 97 mins. B/w.After the success of METROPOLIS, Fritz Lang's next sf film was a disappointment. Overlong (in its original form) and melodramatic, it concerns an ill matched group of people travelling to a MOON which seems little different from the Swiss Alps, airlessness and low gravity being ignored: the explorers are able to amble about picking up chunks of precious metal and jewels (the trip having been arranged by industrialists who believe, correctly, that the Moon is rich in gold). The build-up to the take-off, however, is much more convincing; Lang used rocket experts Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) and Willy LEY as technical advisers, and the model rocket they produced was prophetic in its design - it was even constructed in two stages. The blast-off itself was also impressive, with good camera-work by Oskar Fischinger and effects by Konstantin Tschetwerikoff. Later the Nazis withdrew the film from distribution and destroyed the rocket model, afraid that its accuracy would give away secrets about their own development of military ROCKETS. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA; GERMANY. FRAYN, MICHAEL (1933- ) UK novelist, journalist and playwright, best known for such work outside the sf field as the novel Towards the End of the Morning (1967; vt Against Entropy 1967 US), which despite its vt is not sf. The Tin Men (1965) is a SATIRE on the computerization of human consciousness. A Very Private Life (1968) describes a sanitized Earth with mankind divided into those who live inside germ-free enclaves and those who live outdoors; some ambivalence is expressed throughout as to whether what is being described is a DYSTOPIA or simply a mise en scene: MF lacks, in other words, the ready animus so often found in MAINSTREAM WRITERS when they appropriate sf tropes - almost always imprudently - for satirical purposes. [JC]Other works: Sweet Dreams (1973), an afterlife fantasy.See also: AUTOMATION; LINGUISTICS. FRAZER, SHAMUS Pseudonym of UK writer James Ian Arbuthnot Frazer (1912-1966), whose first sf novel, Acorned Hog (1933), satirizes a socialist NEAR FUTURE United Kingdom, and whose second, A Shroud as Well as a Shirt (1935), describes a succession of political conflicts which lead finally to a world war. Blow, Blow Your Trumpets (1945) is a comic satirical fantasy set in the time of Noah, and explains the necessity of the Flood. [JC] FRAZETTA, FRANK (1928- ) US illustrator, born Frank Frazzetta. A New Yorker, he studied at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts and was then active almost exclusively in COMICS 1944-63, working on both BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY and FLASH GORDON and spending 9 years on Li'l Abner. By the time he came to prominence as a comics illustrator, working on Creepy for Warren Publications (from 1965) and later Vampirella, he had already been introduced (in 1964) to paperback-book-cover ILLUSTRATION by his friend Roy G. KRENKEL, first for ACE BOOKS and then for Lancer Books. He quickly became known (like Krenkel) for HEROIC-FANTASY illustrations, especially (from 1966) for his covers for Lancer's reissue of Robert E. HOWARD's Conan books. Some of his work was sf. He won his only HUGO for Best Professional Artist in 1966, but the lack of further Hugos did not imply a diminution in popularity - on the contrary, although his following was largely, presumably, among FANTASY rather than sf fans. Around this time FF set up, with his wife, a company to sell posters he had designed; later he also painted for a number of calendars. Portfolios produced at this time included the two volumes entitled Burroughs Artist Frank Frazetta (portfolio 1968 and 1973). A further breakthrough was the publication of The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975), which was followed by Frank Frazetta Book Two (1977) and then Three (1978), Four (1980) and Five (1985). Later volumes include Small Wonders: the Funny Animal Art of Frank Frazetta (1992) and Illustrations Arcanum (1994). By the 1980s, however, FF's fame extended well beyond narrow genres: his work was spread over many commercial areas, and his output of specifically fantasy/sf illustration became very small - although it did include the Death Dealer novels by James R. Silke with FF, from 1988, based on an idea (and covers) by FF, as well as covers for the L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE series of original anthologies. Film work by FF includes Fire and Ice (1982), an animated SWORD-AND-SORCERY feature film, produced by Ralph Bakshi and FF, partly designed by FF.FF's vigorous paintings of heavily muscled heroes, often fighting, are notable for their dynamic sense of movement (in contrast, perhaps, to work by Boris VALLEJO and other later, smoother illustrators who are often referred to as having inherited FF's mantle); he is famous, too, for his lush wide-hipped women, often chained or menaced but equally often shown as threatening Amazon Queens. His work has been accused of sexism and criticized as cheaply melodramatic, but at its best it is undeniably spirited and powerful. In the heroic-fantasy mode, FF has been one of the most influential illustrators of the century. [PN]See also: SEX. FRAZIER, ROBERT (ALEXANDER) (1951- ) US editor and writer, most active as a poet, whose several published volumes include Peregrine (coll 1978), Perception Barriers (coll 1987),Co-Orbital Moons (coll 1988) and, perhaps most notably, Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest (coll 1992 chap) with Bruce BOSTON. He has edited 2 vols of sf POETRY, The Rhysling Anthology: Best Science Fiction Poetry of 1982 (anth 1983 chap) and Burning with a Vision: Poetry of Science and the Fantastic (anth 1984), and is a past editor of Star*Line, the newsletter of the SCIENCE FICTION POETRY ASSOCIATION. As an author of fiction, he began relatively late, his first sf story, "Across Those Endless Skies", appearing in In the Field of Fire (anth 1987) ed Jack DANN and Jeanne Dann. He is perhaps most noted for the extended "The Summer People", his contribution to Nantucket Slayrides (coll 1989), the other stories in which are by Lucius SHEPARD. RF wrote the POETRY entry in this encyclopedia. [JC]See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; SF IN THE CLASSROOM. FREAS, (FRANK) KELLY (1922- ) US illustrator, the most popular sf artist in the history of the field; the list of his accomplishments is staggering. Since he entered the field in 1950 he has painted hundreds of covers for 28 magazines, most famously for ASF from 1953 (interior work also) but including also FSF, Planet Stories and If, as well as for many book publishers, including ACE BOOKS, GNOME PRESS, DAW BOOKS and all the covers for LASER BOOKS. The gritty realism of his and Ed EMSHWILLER's work in the 1950s redefined sf art during that period. He also painted many covers for Mad Magazine and designed the astronauts' shoulder patch for the Skylab 1 mission. His art has been collected in a portfolio from ADVENT: PUBLISHERS, Frank Kelly Freas (portfolio 1957), and in 3 books, Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction (1977), Frank Kelly Freas: A Separate Star (1984) and The Astounding Fifties (1971) (1990). Much of his work, sometimes reminiscent of that of Edd CARTIER, is relaxedly humorous, featuring vigorous vagabonds, amiable aliens and a selection of jaunty scoundrels. He has won numerous awards, including 10 HUGOS for Best Professional Artist. [JG/PN]See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; ILLUSTRATION. FREEDMAN, NANCY (1920- ) US actress and writer whose sf novel, Joshua Son of None (1973), one of the earliest novels to deal with cloning ( CLONES), depicts the intrigue surrounding the childhood and adolescence of Joshua Francis Kellogg, cloned in 1963 from the body of John F. Kennedy. [JC]Other works: The Immortals (1976), borderline sf. FREEDOM: THE VOICE FROM EIN HAROD ISRAEL. FREEJACK Film (1992). Morgan Creek/Ronald Shusett/Warner Bros. Dir Geoff Murphy, starring Emilio Estevez, Mick Jagger, Rene Russo, Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Banks. Screenplay Steven Pressfield, Ronald Shusett, Dan Gilroy, based on Immortality, Inc. (1958; exp 1959) by Robert SHECKLEY. 108 mins. Colour.From the producers of TOTAL RECALL (1990) and the New Zealand director of The QUIET EARTH (1985), this disappointing adaptation jettisons much that was interesting in the original book, including the metaphysical speculation about the relation of mind to body and the "scientific" explanations of ghosts, zombies and a technological IMMORTALITY. This is a thriller set 20 years in the future, when rich people with ailing bodies transfer their personalities into healthy bodies hijacked from the past (including our present). Jagger is rather good as the sinister and ubiquitous bodysnatcher who grabs a racing-car driver (Estevez) just as he is about to die violently. Joe Alves's mildly CYBERPUNK production design owes a lot to BLADE RUNNER (1982). [PN] FREKSA, FRIEDRICH [r] GERMANY. FRENCH, PAUL Isaac ASIMOV. FRENKEL, JAMES R. (1948- ) US editor, married to Joan D. VINGE since 1980. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was with Dell Books, where he ed anon the Binary Star books, each comprising two titles bound sequentially ( DOS): Binary Star #1 containing Destiny Times Three (1978 dos) by Fritz LEIBER and Riding the Torch (1978 dos) by Norman SPINRAD, #2 containing The Twilight River (1979 dos) by Gordon EKLUND and The Tery (1979 dos) by F. Paul WILSON, #3 containing Dr Scofflaw (1979 dos) by Ron GOULART and Outerworld (1979 dos) by Isidore HAIBLUM, #4 containing Legacy (1980 dos) by Joan D. VINGE and The Janus Equation (1980 dos) by Steven G. SPRUILL, and #5 containing Nightflyers (1981 dos) by George R.R. MARTIN and TRUE NAMES (1981 dos) by Vernor VINGE. In 1983 he founded BLUEJAY BOOKS, whose strong but underfunded list was forced to cease trading in 1986. [JC] FREWIN, ANTHONY (1947- ) UK publisher and writer, who also worked for five years as an assistant to the film director Stanley KUBRICK. His One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration: 1840-1940 (1974) has a well chosen selection of sf ILLUSTRATIONS, many - unusually - from the 19th century, with a full chapter on Albert ROBIDA. [PN] FREY, JAMES N(ORBERT) (1943- ) US writer whose The Elixir (1986) was a GOTHIC-SF/fantasy story of Nazi Germany, where Hitler's secret weapon is the eponymous aid to IMMORTALITY. His U.S.S.A.: a Novel (1987) is unrelated to the shared-world sequence with the same overall title. [JC] Other works: Circle of Death (1988). [JC] FREZZA, ROBERT (1956- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Max Weber's War" for AMZ in 1987. His sf novel, A Small Colonial War (1990) which, along with its sequel, Fire in a Faraway Place (1993), replays the Boer War on a colony planet, although without Kaffirs. The Imperial military forces, predictably, find the transplanted post- HOLOCAUST Afrikaners tough meat.McLendon's Syndrome (1994) is a space opera featuring a vampire whose allergies - sunlight, for instance - replicate the conventions of supernatural fictions about vampires. [JC] FRIEDBERG, GERTRUDE (TONKONOGY) (1908-1989) US writer who also taught. Her career as a playwright began early, with Three Cornered Moon (1933), which was later filmed, but she began publishing sf only in 1963, with "The Short and Happy Death of George Frumkin" for FSF. Her fine sf novel The Revolving Boy (1966) strikingly tells the story of a child sensitive from his unique birth in free fall to signals, possibly intelligent in origin, from beyond the Solar System. He reveals his sensitivity by being forced to adjust himself - revolving balletically - so that his body is aligned in the direction from which the signals come. [JC] FRIEDELL, EGON (1878-1938) Austrian writer best known for his seminal Cultural History of Modern Times (1927-32), a text which effectively inaugurated the discipline of cultural history. As a Jew, his position became intolerable when the Nazis invaded Austria, and he committed suicide. His wry homage to H.G. WELLS, Die Ruckkehr mit der Zeitmaschine (apparently written c1935; 1946 Germany; trans Eddy C. Bertin as The Return of the Time Machine 1972 US), complete with a spoof correspondence between himself as narrator and Wells's secretary, purports to reprint the Time Traveller's narrative of his later journeys. The story, told with a literate wit reminiscent of some of Karel CAPEK's lighter work, depends on complex mathematical doubletalk for its demonstration of the ultimate futility of TIME TRAVEL. [JC] FRIEDMAN, MICHAEL JAN (1955- ) US writer, mostly notably of STAR TREK and STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION ties, though he has also written a singleton, The Glove of Maiden's Hair (1987), a fantasy set in contemporary New York, and the Vidar fantasy sequence about a son of Odin: The Hammer and the Horn (1985), The Seekers and the Sword (1985) and The Fortress and the Fire (1988). MJF's Star Trek novels are Double, Double * (1989), Legacy * (1991),Faces of Fire * (1992), The Disinherited * (1992) with Robert GREENBERGER and Peter DAVID, and Shadows on the Sun * (1993). His Star Trek: The Next Generation novels are A Call to Darkness * (1989), Doomsday World * (1990) with Carmen CARTER, Peter DAVID and Robert Greenberger, Fortune's Light * (1991),Reunion * (1991) Relics*(1992), All Things Good . . . *(1994) and Requiem * (1994). [JC] FRIEL, ARTHUR O(LNEY) (1885-1959) US writer and explorer, most of whose work appeared in PULP MAGAZINES, including the McKay, Knoulton and Ryan sequence of lost-race (see LOST WORLD) tales set in South America and featuring the exploits of Americans, who eventually establish a kingdom somewhere close to Peru. Those published as books - The Pathless Trail (1922), Tiger River (1923), in which men are transformed into beasts by a strange Circean wine, The King of No Man's Land (1924) and Mountains of Mystery (1925) - were marginal as sf; but "In the Year 2000" (1928 Adventure), which never reached book form, is set after a world war in which White men have triumphed. [JC] FRIEND, ED Richard WORMSER. FRIEND, OSCAR J(EROME) (1897-1963) US writer and editor who worked for the Standard Magazine chain on CAPTAIN FUTURE, STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES during 1941-4, a period when these magazines were most specifically aimed at adolescents. The editorial director at the time was Leo MARGULIES, with whom OJF later edited 3 anthologies (see below). After the death of Otis Adelbert KLINE in 1946, OJF became head of Kline's literary agency. He was intermittently active as a writer from before 1920, concentrating on horror, Western and detective tales, sometimes as Owen Fox Jerome, his first sf story proper being "Of Jovian Build" for Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1938. His first novel, The Hand of Horror (1927) as by Jerome, was a horror tale involving hynotism. His sf books - The Kid from Mars (1940 Startling Stories; 1949), Roar of the Rocket (1940 TWS; 1950 chap Australia) and The Star Men (1963) - are unremarkable but entertaining. [MJE/JC]Other works: From Off this World (anth 1949), My Best Science Fiction Story (anth 1949) and The Giant Anthology of Science Fiction (anth 1954; cut vt Race to the Stars 1958), all with Leo Margulies.See also: ALIENS. FRIGGENS, A. [r] Eric BURGESS. FRITCH, CHARLES E(DWARD) (1927- ) US writer and editor who began publishing sf with "The Wallpaper" for Other Worlds in 1951. He edited the magazine GAMMA 1963-5. His stories, written for a variety of markets but sharing a certain glibness and snappiness of effect, are collected in Crazy Mixed-Up Planet (coll 1969) and Horses' Asteroid (coll 1970). Many are spoofs. [JC] FROESE, ROBERT (1945- ) US academic and writer whose sf novel, The Hour of Blue (1990), presents the strangely consoling notion that Gaia herself is beginning to respond defensively to humanity's rape of the planet, and that the forests in Maine (the state where RF himself teaches) are transforming themselves. [JC] FROGS Film (1972). American International. Dir George McCowan, starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan van Ark, Lynn Borden. Screenplay Robert Hutchison, Robert Blees. 90 mins. Colour.A cheerful exploitation movie, its director's debut and part of the 1970s Revenge-of-Nature boom ( MONSTER MOVIES), F is a rather well made ecological fable in which upper-crust layabouts living on a bayou are disposed of by frogs, spiders, leeches, snakes and snapping turtles (all normal size, but in large numbers), apparently as a payback for Mankind's ill treatment of Nature: a sort of amphibian The BIRDS (1963). [PN] FROM BEYOND Film (1986). Taryn/Empire. Executive prod Charles BAND. Dir Stuart Gordon, starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Ted Sorel, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon. Screenplay Dennis Paoli, based on "From Beyond" (1934) by H.P. LOVECRAFT. 85 mins. Colour.With three of the same leading players, the same production team, and one of Lovecraft's fringe sf stories as its original, this is effectively a sequel to RE-ANIMATOR (1985), and was made as a direct result of that film's success. Lovecraft's idea was that stimulating the pineal gland might open a window to another DIMENSION peopled by MONSTERS. The film adds an element of sexual stimulation to that (psychiatrists in bondage gear, etc.), a not unreasonable reading of Lovecraft's lurid but repressed imaginings, but the main variation is the glee and (occasional) wit with which the disgusting monsters from beyond are set into action. Though an undergraduate-style exercise in SPLATTER-MOVIE bad taste, FB is less gory than Re-Animator. [PN] FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON Film (1958). Waverly/RKO. Dir Byron HASKIN, starring Joseph Cotton, George Sanders, Deborah Paget. Screenplay Robert Blees, James Leicester, adapted from Jules VERNE's De la terre a la lune (1865) and Autour de la lune (1870), the two published together in English translation as From the Earth to the Moon (1873). 100 mins. Colour.Using a new explosive, a projectile carrying human passengers is fired at the Moon from a huge cannon. Paget plays a pretty stowaway. The film, shot in Mexico, is slow-moving and has painful dialogue; it is perhaps the dullest sf movie ever made. There are no scenes on the Moon. A comic version, bearing no relation to Verne's novel, was the UK Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967; vt Those Fantastic Flying Fools) dir Don Sharp, in which a series of farcical misadventures - the rocket lands in Russia, not on the Moon - keeps the story effectively Earthbound. [PN/JB] FROST, GREGORY (DEE) (1951- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Rubbish" for FSF in 1984, and most ofwhose work for a decade was governed by its fantasy tone, including his first novel, Lyrec (1984), which does evoke PARALLEL WORLDS but within a structure of story that does not permit an sf reading; his later sequence,based on Celtic mythology and comprising Tain(1986) and Remscela(1988), is pure fantasy. The Pure Cold Light(1993), on the other hand,is sf, though its plot does play on after-death experiences in amanner peculiarly stretching of the sf frame; overall,though, the book is a remarkably ingenious tale of government and corporation conspiracies involving possible ALIENS, CYBERPUNKriffs in the wastes of NEAR-FUTURE Philadelphia, a femaleprivate investigator, and a drug - Orbitol - whose reality-challenging effects are reminiscent ofsome passages in the work of Philip K. DICK. Literary allusions abound, and wit,and excesses of narrative energy; but because the basic tale veers into the incredible and thecamp, it seems clear that what GF needs in future is a premise capable of taxing hisinventiveness. [JC] FROST, JASON Zebra Books house name, used almost exclusively by US writer Raymond Obstfeld (1952- ) for the Warlord sequence of post- HOLOCAUST sf adventures with a survivalist message: The Warlord (1983), The Warlord #2: The Cutthroat (1984), #3: Badland (1984), #4: Prisonland (1985) and #5: Terminal Island (1985). #6: Killer's Keep (1987) was written as JF by Rich Rainey. A singleton film tie, Invasion U.S.A. * (1985), was by Obstfeld. [JC] FTL Acronym, often used in sf TERMINOLOGY, for FASTER THAN LIGHT. FUENTES, CARLOS (1929- ) Mexican diplomat and writer whose acerbic MAGIC REALISM - a more worldly version of that idiom than found in the works of his coeval, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928- ) - has featured in stories and novels from the 1950s on. They include: Aura (1962; trans Lysander Kemp1965 chap US), a ghost story which incorporates elements of vampirism; La Cabeza de la Hidra (1978; trans Margaret Sayers Peden as The Hydra Head 1978 US), set just before the outbreak of WWIII in Mexico; Terra Nostra (1975; trans Margaret Sayers Peden 1976 US), a vast FABULATION about the entire Earth (though centred in an ALTERNATE-WORLD Paris); Cristobal nonato (1987; trans Alfred MacAdam and CF as Christopher Unborn 1989 US), a NEAR-FUTURE lament for Mexico and the world narrated by a child still in the womb; and Constancia y otras novelas para virgenes (coll 1989; trans Thomas Christensen as Costancia; and Other Stories for Virgins 1990 UK/US), a series of complexly elaborate fables. [JC]See also: LATIN AMERICA. FUENTES, ROBERTO [r] Piers ANTHONY. FUGA DAL BRONX 1990: I GUERRIERI DAL BRONX. FUKKATSO NO HI (vt Virus) Film (1981). Haruki Kadokawa Films. Dir Kinji Fukasaku, starring Masao Kusakari, Chuck Connors, Glenn Ford, Olivia Hussey, George Kennedy, Henry Silva, Robert Vaughn. Screenplay Koji Takada, Gregory Knapp, Fukasaku, from Fukkatsu No Hi (1964) by Sakyo KOMATSU. 155 mins, cut to 108 mins. Colour.It is difficult to judge this reputedly expensive Japanese DISASTER film, which was very successful in Japan, because the export version was severely cut - but one cannot believe it was ever very good. A germ-warfare virus is stolen and accidentally released; only those in very cold areas survive. Then the crazed US Chief of Staff (Silva) sets off a nuclear strike. In the Antarctic, 864 shivering male survivors share 8 women. The story is told as flashback, with a Japanese (Kusakari) looking like a bearded scarecrow about to walk, implausibly, from Washington DC to the Antarctic. (In the Japanese version he makes it.) The characters are appallingly stereotyped. This is a simplistic melodrama with nothing serious to say. [PN] FULLER, ALVARADO M(ORTIMER) (1851-? ) US writer whose sf novel, A.D. 2000 (1890; vt Back to Life A.D. 2000 1911), wakes its protagonist ( SLEEPER AWAKES) in the UTOPIAN culture of AD2000. A single party rules North America, and electrical inventions (after a great disaster with "aluminum bronze", electricity has become the chief source of power) dominate the exiguous storyline. [JC] FULL SPECTRUM US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series published by BANTAM BOOKS since 1988, created by Lou ARONICA, 3 issues to date (Spring 1992): Full Spectrum (anth 1988), ed Aronica with Shawna MCCARTHY, #2 (anth 1989), ed Aronica with Pat Lobrutto, McCarthy and Amy Stout, and #3 (anth 1991), ed Aronica with Betsy Mitchell and Stout. These are fat, prestigious volumes - an unusual publishing ploy at a time when conventional wisdom says sf ANTHOLOGIES sell badly - presumably designed to publicize the Bantam Spectra sf line and to announce that Bantam remains a leader in the sf market. To date their only major award-winner has been "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge" (1988) by James MORROW, which won a NEBULA, but a high count of FS stories have been shortlisted for awards, and FS itself won a Locus Award for Best Anthology in its first year. FS publishes a fairly high proportion of "literary" stories and a low proportion of HARD SF, and mixes well known authors with promising unknowns. [PN] FU MANCHU For a listing of some of the films in which Sax ROHMER's oriental supervillain, armed with the weapons of superscience, appeared, The FACE OF FU MANCHU . [PN] FUNNELL, AUGUSTINE (1952- ) Canadian writer whose two sf novels, Brandyjack (1976) and its sequel, Rebels of Merka (1976) - the only titles published by LASER BOOKS actually to have been written by a Canadian - were unremarkable SPACE OPERAS. In the 1980s AF began to publish short fiction in US magazines. [JC] FUQUA, ROBERT Pseudonym of Chicago-based US illustrator Joseph Wirt Tillotson (? - ), used by him on sf cover paintings (although some of his black-and-white work appeared under his own name). For some time a staff artist for ZIFF-DAVIS magazines, RF painted 25 covers for AMZ 1938-44 and 7 for Fantastic Adventures. In the 1950s, away from Ziff-Davis, he contributed to the Chicago magazines Imagination and Other Worlds. He might have been better known had he worked also for New York-based publishers, but he always restricted himself to Chicago. One of the more prominent sf illustrators of the 1930s and 1940s, RF used very bright colours to compensate for poor reproduction processes. His melodramatic style - the very essence of PULP-MAGAZINE sf - perfectly complemented the lurid Ziff-Davis fiction. [JG/PN] FUREY, MICHAEL Sax ROHMER. FURTINGER, ZVONIMIR [r] YUGOSLAVIA. FURY, THE Film (1978). Frank Yablans Presentations/20th Century-Fox. Dir Brian De Palma, starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Charles Durning, Amy Irving, Fiona Lewis, Andrew Stevens. Screenplay John Farris, based on his The Fury (1976). 118 mins. Colour.After his success with CARRIE (1976), it seems cynical of director De Palma to have made another film about destructive teenage PSI POWERS so quickly. This one has an intricate plot with standard ingredients: the secret government agency experimenting with WEAPONS (in this case, human weapons), the paranoid ( PARANOIA) sense that everything is manipulated by this agency, the FRANKENSTEIN theme of the monster that turns on its creator, and (a Frankenstein subtheme) Freudian hostility between children and parents. The two teenagers who can telekinetically cause blood to spurt from every available orifice of those they attack (or even to explode them) are both corrupted by their power, one deeply, one mildly. The film is a vivid string of fireworks, with De Palma as usual manipulating audience response with bravura, but not creating anything that is more than the sum of its exploitative parts. [PN] FUTRELLE, JACQUES (1875-1912) US writer and theatrical manager, on the editorial staff of the Boston American; he went down with the Titanic. The stories assembled in his Thinking Machine books about the scientific detective Augustus S.F. X. Van Dusen - The Thinking Machine (coll 1907; vt The Problem of Cell 13 1917) and The Thinking Machine on the Case (coll 1908) - are properly detections, though Van Dusen's methods verge on sf. The Thinking Machine (coll 1959) ed Tony Simon contains "The Problem of Cell 13" and 2 other stories. Larger selections have been ed E.F. BLEILER as Best "Thinking Machine"Detective Stories (coll 1973) and Great Cases of the Thinking Machine (coll 1976). The Diamond Master (1909; exp with "The Haunted Bell" as coll c1912), which is sf, revolves melodramatically around the artificial manufacture of diamonds; the added novella is a supernatural tale involving Van Dusen. [JC] FUTURE, THE There are relevant entries throughout, but especially CYBERPUNK; END OF THE WORLD; FAR FUTURE; FUTUROLOGY; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; NEAR FUTURE; PREDICTION. FUTURE COMBINED WITH SCIENCE FICTION FUTURE FICTION. FUTURE COMBINED WITH SCIENCE FICTION STORIES FUTURE FICTION. FUTURE COP TRANCERS. FUTURE COP 2 TRANCERS. FUTURE FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION FUTURE FICTION; SWAN AMERICAN MAGAZINE. FUTURE FICTION US magazine. 17 issues Nov 1939-July 1943, 48 further issues May/June 1950-Apr 1960. Published by Blue Ribbon Magazines, later Double Action Magazines and (from Apr 1941) Columbia Publications; ed Charles D. HORNIG (Nov 1939-Nov 1940) and Robert A.W. LOWNDES (Apr 1941-Apr 1960). FF began as a companion magazine to SCIENCE FICTION, with similar editorial policies. It absorbed its parent magazine in Oct 1941, changing its title to Future Combined with Science Fiction. Under Lowndes's editorship it began to feature stories by such fellow FUTURIANS as James BLISH, C.M. KORNBLUTH and Donald A. WOLLHEIM, often under pseudonyms. It also carried some of the earliest magazine covers done by Hannes BOK. The title changed again to Future Fantasy and Science Fiction in Oct 1942, and finally to Science Fiction Stories in Apr 1943. The 2 issues of this final wartime incarnation are virtually identical in appearance to Science Fiction, but as they continue the numbering of FF they are considered part of its run.FF was one of the many magazines to fall victim to wartime paper shortages, but it was revived under the same editor in 1950 as Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories, which became Future Science Fiction Stories in Jan 1952 and, finally, Future Science Fiction in May 1952. It changed from PULP to DIGEST size in June 1954. It was one of several respectable but mediocre magazines edited on shoestring budgets by Lowndes during the 1950s. The volume numbering was taken over by The ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION STORIES with its Jan 1955 issue (vol 5 #4), suggesting the death of Future Science Fiction; however, the latter reappeared a little later in 1955, apparently unhurt, with #28. (The numeration of Columbia's magazines has baffled generations of collectors.) There were 2 UK reprint runs of FF, 14 issues 1951-4 in pulp format, and 11 digest issues 1957-60. [MJE/PN] FUTURE HISTORIES especially GALACTIC EMPIRES; HISTORY IN SF; NEAR FUTURE; PREDICTION; WAR. FUTURE PUBLICATIONS FANTASY MAGAZINE/FANTASY FICTION; SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION 1. Variant title of FUTURE FICTION in its 1950s incarnation.2. Australian DIGEST-size magazine. 6 numbered, undated issues (2 in 1953, 3 in 1954, 1 in 1955) published by Frew Publications, Sydney, plus 2 (1967) published by Page Publications, NSW; ed anon. The Frew series used a mixture of US reprints, 13 new US stories and 4 new Australasian stories; the Page series reprinted #4 and #6 from the Frew publications, renumbering them #1 and #2. A companion magazine to both versions was POPULAR SCIENCE FICTION. [FHP/PN] FUTURE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES FUTURE FICTION. FUTURE WAR HISTORY OF SF; INVASION; WAR. FUTURES PAST US historical SEMIPROZINE, three issues in 1992, ed Jim Emerson, pub Jim Mladenovic from Convoy, Ohio, small- BEDSHEET format, saddle-stapled. This ambitious venture was sadly soon aborted. Subtitled "A Visual Guidebook To Science Fiction History", each issue was to cover the history of one year in sf; this began in the first issue with 1926, and ended in the third with 1928. Thus about 65 issues never came out. Articles,bios, checklists, movie lists, chronologies - all well researched - were interspersed with magazine illos and photographs somewhat smudgily reproduced. [PN] FUTUREWORLD Film (1976). AIP. Dir Richard T. Heffron, starring Peter Fonda, Blythe Danner, Arthur Hill. Screenplay Mayo Simon, George Schenck. 104 mins. Colour.An inferior sequel to WESTWORLD (1973), set in the same theme park, Delos, F lacks the unity and impact of Michael CRICHTON's original film. In a newly built area of Delos, devoted to dramatizing the future, there are several diverting scenes irrelevant to the main plot, which is one of PULP-MAGAZINE sf's oldest: a mad SCIENTIST (revealed at the end to be himself a ROBOT) creates robot duplicates of influential people to enable him to rule the world. His plan is uncovered by two journalists reporting the grand opening. F is rather ill organized and crude. The novel Futureworld * (1976) was adapted by John Ryder Hall (William ROTSLER) from the screenplay. [JB] FUTURIAN, THE UK FANZINE (1938-40), ed from Leeds by J. Michael Rosenblum. A continuation of the Leeds SCIENCE FICTION LEAGUE's Bulletin (1937), The Futurian was a small printed publication featuring fiction, poems and articles by leading sf fans of the day, including Arthur C. CLARKE, Ralph Milne FARLEY, John Russell FEARN, David H. KELLER, Frederik POHL and William F. TEMPLE. Other important pre-WWII UK fanzines were John CHRISTOPHER's The Fantast, Jonathan BURKE's and Charles Eric MAINE's Satellite, Donald Mayer's Tomorrow (incorporating Walter GILLINGS's SCIENTIFICTION) and Maurice K. Hanson's NOVAE TERRAE (later NEW WORLDS). Under the title Futurian War Digest (1940-45), Rosenblum's fanzine became a focal point for UK fandom during the WWII years when sf and amateur publishing faced considerable difficulties. It was revived as The New Futurian 1954-8. [PR] FUTURIANS A New York sf group active 1938-45, notable for radical politics and the conviction that sf fans should be forward-looking and constructive; the name came from J. Michael Rosenblum's UK fanzine, The FUTURIAN . Though deeply involved in FANZINE publishing and internal fan politics, The Futurians also brought together many young fans who hoped to become sf writers. Members included Isaac ASIMOV, James BLISH, C.M. KORNBLUTH, David KYLE, Robert A.W. LOWNDES, Frederik POHL - who describes this period in The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (1978) - Richard WILSON and Donald A. WOLLHEIM; also associated with the group were Hannes BOK, Damon KNIGHT - who in The Futurians (1977) published an informal history of the group - Judith MERRIL and Larry T. SHAW. [PR/PN] FUTURIANS, THE The Futurians sounds like a group of aliens who were transmitted through Time. But, in fact, they were teenagers who shared a house in 1939 and who also shared a love of science fiction. Their ranks eventually included Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Damon Knight, and James Blish.The Secret Service raided their Brooklyn home one night after neighbors, suspicious of their mimeograph machines and strange visitors, reported them as counterfeitors. What they found were law-abiding, if slightly obsessed, SF fans. FUTURIAN WAR DIGEST The FUTURIAN . FUTURISTIC SCIENCE STORIES UK pocketbook-size magazine. 16 issues, numbered, undated, 1950-58, published by John Spencer, London; ed John S. Manning (pseudonym of publishers Sol Assael and Michael Nahum). FSS was one of 4 almost identical low-quality juvenile sf magazines - all of minimal interest - published by Spencer; the others were TALES OF TOMORROW, WONDERS OF THE SPACEWAYS and WORLDS OF FANTASY. #1-#15 appeared 1950-54; #16 did not appear until 1958. (For more information on Spencer's publications BADGER BOOKS.) [FHP] FUTURISTIC STORIES UK pulp-size magazine. 2 undated issues, 1946, published by Hamilton & Co., Stafford; ed anon. FS was poor-quality, juvenile, and of little interest. As with its companion magazine, STRANGE ADVENTURES, the Entire contents were written by Norman FIRTH. [FHP] FUTUROLOGY The word "futurology" is a neologism coined in 1943 by a refugee German professor of sociology, Ossip K. Flechtheim, then teaching in a US college. He argued for a concerted effort by sociologists, historians, psychologists, economists and political scientists to examine social and technological trends as a means of learning the true shape of coming things. He sent his proposals to Aldous HUXLEY, who took them up with enthusiasm, and thereby conveyed the word into the language. Now futurologists are everywhere except perhaps in the very poorest countries. History shows that human beings are ab origine future-directed animals. Ever since Homo erectus began the long trek out of Africa and into Eurasia, the horizon-watchers have known that their survival might well depend on what they found over the hill, in the no-man's time of the day after. But the literature of proposals and projections about future things appears as a mere blip at the end of civilization's 10,000-year record. It is strange, too, that UTOPIAS, DYSTOPIAS, forecasts, projections and sf are in origin, and still largely, a Western intellectual activity. All these future-oriented activities may have begun with the first modern utopias to present the other-history of the better society. Thomas MORE's Utopia (Part Two 1516 in Latin; trans Ralphe Robynson with the later Part One 1551) and Francis BACON's New Atlantis (1627; 1629) contained ideologies which had already worked their benign effects in the could-be of imagined lands, and might serve as guides for achieving a more perfect way of life in the real world of a reformed England. In the beginning, then, the future was another place, and the VIRTUAL REALITY of word-generated social systems and behaviour patterns in the utopias made for a most effective connection between today and tomorrow.There was still a long way to go before considered forecasts. The world had to wait for the new ideas about the progress of mankind that, in the mid-18th century, were to mark out the base for a calculus of probabilities. In his very influential Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind (1750) Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), then a student at the Sorbonne, provided the historical evidence that allowed him to indicate the main lines of human progress. Since, he argued, mankind had advanced from primitive beginnings to the glorious days of Louis XV, it followed that the human race would "go on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection". The details of this march forward awaited the work of men like Adam Smith (1723-1790), who in his Wealth of Nations (1776) reduced the entirety of ECONOMICS, industry and commerce to a Newtonian universe of actions and reactions.At around this time the great divide between fiction and prediction began to narrow, as the first tales of the future spread their message of the centuries ahead. The most important was Louis-Sebastien MERCIER's L'an 2440 (1771; trans as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772), which described a better future world in which the social ideals of the Enlightenment had prevailed: constitutional monarchs, deism the universal religion, education for all. The most telling register of expected change was in the technology of the future: a Suez Canal, rapid BALLOON transportation between continents, and "all sorts of machines for the relief of Man in laborious works".Still the would-be predictors awaited the theories and techniques that would help them provide for the whole of society what Adam Smith had provided for a part. New means of assessment and measurement swiftly arrived. In 1798 Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) published his notorious Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he pessimistically linked the future of humanity to the potentially geometrical growth of population and the merely arithmetical growth of the rations that sustained it, a situation that could be balanced only if vast numbers died. A tremendous debate about humankind's future followed, partly because this early example of Future Shock had coincided with the publication by Edward Jenner (1749-1823) of his paper on the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, which provided the first marvellous promise that the future would be different. By that time James Watt's steam engine was providing power on an unprecedented scale, and the Industrial Revolution was on the point of transforming the world.It seems strange, with change so rapidly manifesting itself, that it was almost a century before straightforward forecasts like Dans cent ans ["In 100 Years"] (1892) by Charles Richet (1850-1935) came to be published. But in the 19th century the "certainty factor" persuaded everyone that change and technological development could be accommodated within the known social system. The same, but better, was the slogan - or, in the Tennysonian phrase, the great world would "spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change". So people invented new methods to measure the changes they considered most important. The first decennial census of 1801 began the continuing measure of population; the Belgian mathematician Lambert Quetelet (1796-1874) adopted the Laplace probability theory to produce the crucial concept of the Average Man. Also significant was the first attempt to analyse the new literature of the future in Le roman de l'avenir ["The Novel of the Future"] (1834) by Felix Bodin ( FRANCE). Another sign was the inauguration of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831.The flood of forecasting literature did not take place until around 1890, beginning with sustained discussion about the next great WAR (a discussion catalysed by the War of 1870). Its first major prediction was the work of Polish banker and statistician Ivan Gottlieb de Bloch (1836-1902), who produced the classic analysis in The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations (1897). His findings, ignored by the generals, led him to forecast a great war of entrenchment. Soon forecasts became part of popular writing: weekly magazines occasionally featured articles with illustrations of flying machines, motor cars and television. Some two dozen books were published at this time about the future, including George Ermann on the imperial German future in Deutschland im Jahre 2000 ["Germany in the Year 2000"] (1891), the influential Esquisse de l'organisation politique et economique de la societe future (1899; trans P.H. Lee Warner as The Society of To-Morrow 1904) by Gustave de Molinari (1819-1911), and the collection by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) of the expectations of 10 eminent socialists in Forecasts of the Coming Century (coll 1897). The most widely read of them all in the Anglo-Saxon world was the series of articles by H.G. WELLS in Fortnightly Review in 1900, published as Anticipations (1901).The next advances in the investigation of the future followed two major innovations between the two world wars. In the 1920s the publishing house Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner brought out a series of 86 monographs in their Today and Tomorrow series, in which scientists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians and others set down their expectations of the future. One was J.B.S. HALDANE's Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924), which accurately forecast advances in biology that gave Aldous Huxley important ideas for BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). The series was widely reported and did much to publicize thinking about the future. More important, however, was the first major state initative in this regard. The US President, Herbert Hoover, in 1930 appointed a National Resources Committee "to examine and report upon recent social trends in the United States with a view to providing such a review as might supply a basis for the formulation of large national policies looking to the next phase in the nation's development". The committee, drawing on the resources of field-survey techniques formulated at the University of Chicago, presented their conclusions in their report Recent Social Trends (1932), which provided a model for the USA and an example to the rest of the world.The development of techniques for investigating the future accelerated during WWII, especially the Operational Research procedures borrowed from the UK by the US Army Air Force. These proved so successful in the air war that General Henry Arnold established a research centre to investigate possible developments in warfare. This had the codename RAND (Research and Development), and in 1948 the project team set up an independent non-profit organization known as the RAND Corporation. It had immense influence on military planning and on presidential decisions about the manufacture of nuclear weapons; it was the first "think tank", and from it came the System Development Institute and the Hudson Institute. The latter gained world notoriety when Herman Kahn (1922-1983) published books such as On Escalation (1968) that took the hardest of looks into the future. Indeed, this was a period of rapid growth in futurology, with a great many books and journals published on the subject. Kahn's books were among the best-known, but futurology's limitations as a science can be seen very clearly in his Things to Come (1972), a book about what to expect in the 1970s and 1980s. The index has no entries for oil, gasoline, energy, resources or power; Kahn's only remark about the Arabs is to say that, because the West is their only market, we need expect no problems of supply. Sf writers, too, were unsuccessful in predicting the energy crisis, but few as blandly and so close to the time when it happened as this.A very influential, albeit flawed, work of futurology was the report of the Club of Rome on OVERPOPULATION and diminishing resources, excerpts from which were published as The Limits to Growth (1972). Alvin TOFFLER's book Future Shock (1970) was a bestselling work of SOCIOLOGY rather than futurology; it documented the increasing rate of change in the 20th century, but was comparatively cautious in making specific predictions about the future. At the other extreme were books of popularization like The Next Ten Thousand Years (1974) by Adrian BERRY, a work of technological optimism packed with "what-ifs" and predictions rather than futurology per se. There are many of these.The modern "science" of futurology is the forecasting of the future (usually the NEAR FUTURE) by projection and extrapolation from current trends, statistics, population figures, political groupings, availability of resources, economic data, etc. It cannot be called a science proper, since too many of the factors involved are imponderable (and often unknown), but its tools are statistical analysis and the computer simulation of various models.It may seem that the futurologist and the sf writer are involved in the same trade, but they share a certain unease about one another. Futurologists work primarily on what can be quantified, and to a large degree their projections depend on the future being the same as the past. Population projections for the UK, for example, were for a long time too high because demographers were unable to quantify the factors that persuade people to have fewer children. Sf writers are not actually in the prediction business, but when they deal with the near future they normally write a "what-if?" scenario, which may involve discontinuities with the past. In practice, this is only to say that the factors sf writers deal with include a good deal of guesswork and invention. What makes sf writers unreliable as predictors is the nature of that "what if?". It may appeal to the writer because of its intrinsic interest or its function as a warning symbol, rather than for its likelihood. Writers often do not believe in it themselves; they are writing stories, not prophecies. Also, the sf writer is often ignorant of the mechanisms, such as those of ECONOMICS, which must play an important role in any realistic story of future cause and effect.Where sf writers have an advantage is in the ability to adopt a multidisciplinary approach; they are often good at what is sometimes known as lateral thinking. In a sense the advantage sf writers have is their very irresponsibility: they cannot be held accountable for the nature of their scenarios; the details do not have to be justified. This allows sf writers to survey a far greater range of possibility than the comparatively restricted futurologist. The writer can take the unexpected into account, and history tells us that the unexpected does indeed often happen. Sf itself may give direction to change, through a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, by presenting images of the future which grip people's minds; e.g., the US space programme, which could not have been funded without popular support, or the multistorey apartment blocks that were built by local authorities in such disastrously great numbers in the UK after WWII, designed by a generation of architects reared on the utopian-sf visual imagery of the 1920s.Neither futurologists nor sf writers have done very well at PREDICTION, though perhaps the writers' emphasis on the lives of individuals seems more humane than the futurologists' statistical projections about the masses. Many examples of sf about the general area also covered by futurology can be found under TECHNOLOGY, ECOLOGY, NEAR FUTURE, OVERPOPULATION and WAR. John BRUNNER is one notable writer who has written novels of this kind. Often, of course, Brunner and others are not so much predicting as trying to avert; they hope their ghastly scenarios will be influential as a kind of early-warning system. Arthur C. CLARKE, on the other hand, has used much optimistic futurological speculation in both his factual books and his fiction.Sf itself has also produced futurologists as characters, the best known being the exponents of PSYCHOHISTORY in Isaac ASIMOV's Foundation series. [IFC/PN] FYFE, H(ORACE) B(OWNE) (1918- ) US writer whose first sf story, "Locked Out", appeared in ASF in 1940 but who became active, mainly with stories in ASF, only after WWII army service. By 1967, when he became inactive, he had published nearly 60 stories. His Bureau of Slick Tricks tales (ASF 1948-52) are typical of John W. CAMPBELL's need for stories in which humans inevitably outwit thick-skulled (often bureaucratic) ALIENS. In his novel, D-99 (fixup 1962), which continues the series, Department 99 of the Terran government has the job of finagling citizens out of jams on other planets and flummoxing thicker species. The tone is fortunately light. [JC] FYSH Leonard G. FISH. |