SF&F encyclopedia (O-O)O'BRIEN, DAVID (? - ) UK writer of whom nothing is known except that he wrote several early-1950s sf novels for CURTIS WARREN under various house names, including the International Research Council sequence - Photomesis (1952) and Black Infinity (1952) - as Berl CAMERON, Blue Asp (1952) as Rand LE PAGE, Stella Radium Discharge (1952) as Kris LUNA, and Ships of Vero (1952) as Brian SHAW. [JC] O'BRIEN, DAVID WRIGHT (1918-1944) US writer. A nephew of Farnsworth WRIGHT, he published almost entirely for the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines AMAZING STORIES and Fantastic Adventures from early 1940; there were about 40 stories and novels under his own name plus others under various pseudonyms, including John York Cabot (the Sergeant Shane series and about 20 further tales), Bruce Dennis, Duncan Farnsworth (19 stories), Richard Vardon and the house names Alexander BLADE and Clee GARSON; nothing reached book form. He also collaborated with William P. McGivern (1921-1982) on 4 stories. Almost all his work was SPACE OPERA or other routine adventure. He served in the US Army Air Force and was shot down over Berlin. [JC] O'BRIEN, DEAN D. [s] Eando BINDER. O'BRIEN, E.G. [s] Arthur C. CLARKE. O'BRIEN, FITZ-JAMES (1828-1862) Irish-born US writer, active from his arrival in New York in 1852 until he died of an infected wound in the Civil War. FJO contributed numerous poems and minor stories to the magazines, but his importance rests on a handful of brilliantly original sf tales, which were influential not only on subsequent sf but also on the development of the short-story genre.His finest work is "The Diamond Lens" (1858), a long, precisely detailed story about a SCIENTIST who invents a supermicroscope and is then consumed by his morbid love for a beautiful woman he perceives living in an infinitesimal world inside a drop of water ( GREAT AND SMALL). What Was It? A Mystery (1859 Harper's; 1974 chap) tells of an encounter with an invisible being whose nature remains an enigma, although a plastercast made while the creature is chloroformed reveals it as a hideous diminutive humanoid ( INVISIBILITY). These two stories, his best known, are both set firmly in mid-19th-century New York, and helped establish a mode of sf characterized by surface realism. In a similar vein was the earlier "The Bohemian" (1855), in which the narrator's passionate love for gold fatally induces him to have his fiancee mesmerized in order to reveal the whereabouts of a treasure. "From Hand to Mouth" (1858) is a remarkable surrealistic fantasy in which a man sits in the Hotel de Coup d'Oeil surrounded by disembodied but living eyes, ears, mouths and hands. In "The Lost Room" (1858) a strange house, whose intricate "corridors and passages, like mathematical lines, seemed capable of indefinite expansion", becomes the scene of an orgy by six male and female "enchanters" who apparently succeed in kidnapping the narrator's room into some other world or DIMENSION. "The Wondersmith" (1859) is notable in the history of sf, despite its fantastic framework, for its extended descriptions of an army of miniature automata. The posthumous "How I Overcame my Gravity" (1864), though marred by the use of dream, is otherwise a singularly modern piece of sf: its core is a detailed description of suborbital flight achieved with the aid of gyroscopic stabilization. The great strength of FJO's sf is its inventiveness, which also became its greatest weakness whenever he allowed ingenuity to dominate the fiction. "The Diamond Lens" remains a masterpiece because he subordinated his brilliant invention to a profound exploration of the diseased psychology of one of the main figures of his age, the would-be lone genius of scientific creation.FJO's works have been collected in various posthumous editions: Poems and Stories (coll 1881) ed (sometimes damagingly) by poet and reviewer William Winter (1836-1917), a member with FJO of the Pfaff's Cellar literary circle in New York; The Diamond Lens and Other Stories (coll 1885); What Was It? and Other Stories (coll 1889); Collected Stories by Fitz-James O'Brien (coll 1925); The Fantastic Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien (coll 1977). These were all superseded by The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien, Volume One: Macabre Tales (coll 1988) and The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien, Volume Two: Dream Stories and Fantasies (coll 1988), both ed Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1950- ), which assembles some previously uncollected work and presents well known texts in their original magazine versions. [HBF]See also: HISTORY OF SF. O'BRIEN, FLANN Pseudonym of Irish writer and civil servant Brian O Nolan (1911-1966), who also wrote-mainly for a newspaper column - as Myles na Gopaleen, sometimes rendered Myles na gCopaleen. He is best known for work outside the sf field, such as the FABULATION, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939 UK), a fantasy "saga" at the heart of which mythological entities inflict themselves on a character within a book by a man about whom the protagonist of the actual novel is writing a book, and Faustus Kelly (1943) as by Myles na Gopaleen, a fantasy play about the Devil in Ireland; Rhapsody in Stephen's Green (1994 UK), which was produced in 1943, is a beast-fable, based on the Brothers CAPEK Insect Play of 1921, and dangerously satirical of both Ulster and Eire. FO's novels most closely resembling sf are The Third Policeman (written c1940; 1967 UK), a fantasy, featuring numerous sciencefictional devices, in which a murderer sets off (by bicycle) through a fantasmagorical posthumous POCKET UNIVERSE whose circularity is not spatial but temporal, and The Dalkey Archive (1964 UK), which utilizes material from the previous book in its entrancingly eccentric presentation of a plot featuring a mad SCIENTIST eager to destroy the world, and the fantastic results of a gas he invents. [JC/PN] O'BRIEN, ROBERT C(ARROLL) Pseudonym of US writer Robert Lesly Carroll Conly (1922-1973); his books were marketed as juveniles, though the last two are essentially adult. His first, The Silver Crown (1968), is a sometimes frightening, complex fantasy about the kidnapping of a young girl by a king who is ruled in turn by a malignant MACHINE. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971; vt The Secret of NIMH 1982), which won the Newbery Medal, tells of a group of fugitive rats from a laboratory where their INTELLIGENCE has been enhanced; with the help of Mrs Frisby, a field mouse, they found an independent colony, determined not to batten on humans. The treatment is realistic and without a trace of whimsy. After his death his daughter, Jane Leslie Conly, wrote two sequels, Rasco and the Rats of NIMH (1986) and R.T., Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH (1991). RCO's A Report from Group 17 (1972) is about biological warfare between the USA and Russia; it is competent, but less successful than his other work. In Z for Zachariah (1975), a post- HOLOCAUST novel of considerable sensitivity, a solitary surviving adolescent girl comes to realize that she cannot make a life with the male survivor who has entered her quiet valley; she eludes his attempt at rape and travels across the desolated landscape in search of other survivors. It is a fine book, morally complex, and not simply a story of good versus evil; the girl's victory is ambiguous. RCO died before the novel was quite finished; it was completed by his family. [PN/JC]See also: CHILDREN'S SF. O'BRIEN, WILLIS H(AROLD) (1886-1962) US special-effects supervisor in the film industry. For his own amusement he early began to experiment with stop-motion photography. A 1min home movie of an animated caveman and dinosaur, involving 960 separate exposures, led to a producer advancing him $5000 to make a more elaborate version of the same subject: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1917) ran for only 5 mins but took 2 months to make. It proved successful and later the same year he made a series of similar films for the Edison Company. In 1919 he made the more elaborate The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, one of the first films to combine footage of live actors with animated models.WHO's first full-length film was The LOST WORLD (1925), whose success led him to start work on a project of epic proportions, Creation, a variation on the LOST-WORLD theme. It was never completed, but he incorporated much of its material (including improved designs for his models, which by then had metal skeletons with ball-and-socket joints) into KING KONG (1933), which proved to be the peak of his career. A sequel, SON OF KONG (1933), was hurriedly made, but after that WHO found difficulty in getting backing for his increasingly expensive projects. In the late 1930s he began work on The War Eagles (it was to climax in an aerial battle between airships and men riding giant eagles over New York City), but the film was abandoned, as was his 1942 project, Gwangi, about cowboys who discover dinosaurs on a Texas mesa (it was eventually filmed as The VALLEY OF GWANGI [1969]). It was not until 1949 that he was able to complete another partially animated feature, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (an unambitious rerun of the King Kong theme), assisted by his new young protege, Ray HARRYHAUSEN. It was the last film over which he had real control. During the 1950s he worked on MONSTER MOVIES for other people but was unable to obtain backing for his own films. He died in 1962 while working on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963 dir Stanley Kramer). Despite his comparatively small output, he is widely regarded as one of the great pioneers of special effects in fantastic cinema. [JB] OBRUCHEV, VLADIMIR A(FANASEVICH) (1863-1956) Russian geologist, academician and writer. Two of his novels, both early classics of Russian sf, have been translated: Plutoniia (1915; 1924; trans B. Pearce as Plutonia 1957) and Zemlya Sannikova (1926; trans Y. Krasny as Sannikov Land 1955 USSR). Both are adventures after the style of Jules VERNE, aimed at younger readers, and informatively crammed with geological and palaeontological data. The first is a HOLLOW-EARTH story in which a party of Russian explorers enters the Earth via an unknown landmass north of the Bering Strait and finds a LOST WORLD full of prehistoric reptiles. The second is similar; a volcano thrusting through the Arctic icecap to the far north of Siberia has a fertile lost world, populated by a stone-age people, inside its huge crater. Other, untranslated, works by VO were travel novels set in Central Asia. [PN]See also: RUSSIA. OBUKHOVA, LYDIA (1924- ) Russian writer who began publishing work of interest as early as 1945, and whose books gained some popularity in her native land. Lilit (trans Mirra Ginsburg as Daughter of Night 1974 US) tells the story of Adam's first wife, Lilith, who meets an ALIEN assessing Earth for colonization. He falls in love with her, presents her with the gift of fire, and saves the planet from his own people. [JC] OCEANOGRAPHY UNDER THE SEA. OCTOBER, JOHN [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. OCTOPUS, THE US PULP MAGAZINE. 1 issue, Feb/Mar 1939, published by Popular Publications; ed Rogers Terrill. The feature novel, "The City Condemned to Hell" by Randolph Craig (Norvell W. PAGE), was actually a rewritten SPIDER story; the evil Octopus broadcasts a ray that turns people into monsters. It was reprinted as Pulp Classics #11 (1976) ( Robert E. WEINBERG). The SCORPION was a follow-up to O. The single issue was confusingly designated Vol 1 #4. [MJE/FHP] ODELL, SAMUEL W. (1864-1948) US writer of 2 sf books, Atlanteans (coll 1889) and The Last War, or The Triumph of the English Tongue (1898). In the latter, a future- WAR story set in the 26th century, the highly civilized all-White Allied Anglo-American Nations decide, more in sorrow, to engage in "war to the end" against a miscegenate evil empire controlled by the Russian Czar, destroying millions of the foe before their inevitable victory. [JC] ODLE, E(DWIN) V(INCENT) (1890-1942) UK writer and editor. As younger brother of Alan Odle, who was the husband of Dorothy M. Richardson (1873-1957), EVO came into close contact with J.D. BERESFORD, who had been instrumental in publishing the first volume of Richardson's Pilgrimage in 1915. EVO's sole sf novel, The Clockwork Man (1923), clearly shows Beresford's influence, and may also have been published with his help. In this graceful SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, a CYBORG - in this case a man into whose body a clock has been inserted - comes accidentally back through time from AD8000 to the present, where he plays cricket and describes a world in which life regulated by MACHINES is accepted by most, though not all. God, it is hoped, has been taking note of the new, improved version of humanity. [JC]See also: DIMENSIONS; EVOLUTION; HISTORY OF SF; SUPERMAN; TIME TRAVEL. ODOM, MEL [r] Warren C. NORWOOD. O'DONNELL, KEVIN Jr (1950- ) US author with a BA in Chinese Studies who has spent several years in the Far East. His first published sf was "The Hand is Quicker" (1973 ASF), and over 50 short stories have followed. His first novel, Bander Snatch (1979), curiously blends pulp cliche and real inventiveness in its tale of a ghetto mobster who has telepathic powers and learns to use them responsibly. Mayflies (1979), which shows a real advance in narrative skill, is a GENERATION-STARSHIP story where ephemeral human lives flit past the hero, an (immortal) human brain embedded in the ship's COMPUTER and fighting for control. KO is perhaps best known for the amusing series The Journeys of McGill Feighan, which consists to date of The Journeys of McGill Feighan: Book I: Caverns (1981), Book II: Reefs (1981), Book III: Lava (1982) and Book IV: Cliffs (1986). Feighan is a flinger (he can teleport people and things) who, though based on Earth, solves problems on various planets; his quest is for the godlike Far Being who has interfered with his life since birth. Like most of KO's fiction, these are interesting, light-hearted books, casual in their tone of voice, like a hybrid of Ron GOULART and Jack VANCE. ORA:CLE (1984), complexly plotted, has an expert on Asian history, brain-linked with a computer, in a future where people live indoors because the air is bad outside and aliens hunt you there. Fire on the Border (1990), a SPACE OPERA with interstellar warfare and a Japanese general, is crammed with almost too much incident. It would be interesting to see what KO could do if his novels proceeded less breathlessly. [PN]Other works: War of Omission (1982); The Shelter (1987) with Mary Kittredge, horror; The Electronic Money Machine (1984), written with the Haven Group, nonfiction about personal computers.See also: CYBORGS; SPACESHIPS. O'DONNELL, K.M. Barry N. MALZBERG. O'DONNELL, LAWRENCE Henry KUTTNER; C.L. MOORE. O'DONNELL, MARGARET (? - ) Irish writer whose The Beehive (1980) is a FEMINIST thriller set in a DYSTOPIAN world. [JC] O'DUFFY, EIMAR (1893-1935) Irish writer whose mock-epic-Irish Aloysius O'Kennedy sequence-King Goshawk and the Birds (1926), The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) and Asses in Clover (1933) - makes satirical points about contemporary civilization, very much in the manner of James Stephens (1882-1950) in The Crock of Gold (1912), by assessing modern life through the eyes of characters who are, or claim to be, figures of Irish legend. The second volume mounts its comparatively sustained SATIRE through its heroes' voyage to a UTOPIA where everything is, not unusually, inverted. The third, set like the first in Ireland after 1950, musters the forces of legend to defeat US capitalism in the form of the egregious King Goshawk. [JC]Other works: Bricriu's Feast (1919), a fantasy play.About the author: Eimar O'Duffy (1972 chap) by Robert Hogan. ODYSSEY US BEDSHEET-size magazine. 2 issues, Spring and Summer 1976, published by Gambi Publications, New York; ed Roger ELWOOD. O was advertised as an sf magazine, but contained a high proportion of fantasy. The fiction and articles were unremarkable; lead novellas were by Jerry POURNELLE (#1) and Larry NIVEN (#2). Production was poor, and the covers by Frank Kelly FREAS and Jack GAUGHAN were inferior to their usual work. Bad distribution and poor sales killed O. [FHP/PN] OFFRET Andrei TARKOVSKY. OFFUTT, ANDREW J(EFFERSON V) (1937- ) US writer who often signed his name andrew j offutt; his first published story was as by Andy Offutt and his first professional sale was as by A.J. Offutt. That first published story, a contest winner, was "And Gone Tomorrow" for If in 1954, but he regards his professional sf career as beginning with "Blacksword" for Gal in 1959. He soon became a prolific writer in several genres, both under his own name and under pseudonyms including John Cleve (see below for the Spaceways sequence), Jeff Douglas and the house name J.X. WILLIAMS. The pseudonymous works have been SEX novels, several with sf content. AJO's first sf novel under his own name was Evil is Live Spelled Backwards (1970), in which an underground movement opposes a 21st-century religious tyranny through sexual revolution. The Castle Keeps (1972) more ambitiously depicts - through an acid examination of SURVIVALIST shibboleths - the violent disintegration of Western culture. A juvenile, The Galactic Rejects (1973), features three young friends with PSI POWERS on a UTOPIAN world threatened by invasion.From the mid-1970s, with the appearance of tales like Messenger of Zhuvastou (1973) and My Lord Barbarian (1977), AJO turned primarily to fantasy, usually SWORD AND SORCERY, often works tied to other authors' creations, though much of the John Cleve sf erotica was published in the 1980s. His urgent, sometimes rather hasty style and his sharp intelligence are most effectively deployed in sf stories depicting a hectic urban world and, though he clearly finds all sorts of material congenial, his later career has not been of striking interest. [JC]Other works: The Great 24-Hour Thing (1971); Ardor on Aros (1973); Genetic Bomb (1975) with D(ouglas) Bruce Berry; the Cormac Mac Art sequence, based on Robert E. HOWARD's character and comprising Sword of the Gael * (1975), The Undying Wizard * (1976), Sign of the Moonbow * (1977), The Mists of Doom * (1977), When Death Birds Fly * (1980) with Keith Taylor (1946- ) and The Tower of Death * (1982) with Taylor; Chieftain of Andor (1976; vt Clansman of Andor 1979 UK); a Conan parody, The Black Sorcerer of the Black Castle (1976 chap) plus 3 Conan novels, Conan and the Sorcerer * (1978), The Sword of Skelos * (1979) and Conan the Mercenary * (1980); the War of the Wizards fantasy sequence, all with Richard K. Lyon (1933- ), comprising Demon in the Mirror (1978), Eyes of Sarsis (1980) and Web of the Spider (1981); the War of the Gods on Earth fantasy sequence, comprising The Iron Lords (1979), Shadows Out of Hell (1980) and The Lady of the Snowmist (1983); King Dragon (1980); Shadowspawn * (1987), whose labelling identifies it as a contribution to the Thieves' World SHARED-WORLD enterprise but which is, according to AJO, not so - a denial whose terms might also apply to The Shadow of Sorcery*(1993); Deathknight (1990).As John Cleve:Barbarana (1970); The Devoured (1970); Fruit of the Loins (1970); Jodinareh (1970); The Juice of Love (1970); Pleasure Us! (1971; vt The Pleasure Principal 1975 as by Baxter Giles); Manlib! (1974); The Sexorcist (1974; vt Unholy Revelry 1976); the Spaceways sequence (the first 6 written solo, most of the rest in collaboration, but all signed Cleve alone), comprising Spaceways #1: Of Alien Bondage (1982), #2: Corundum's Woman (1982), #3: Escape from Macho (1982), #4: Satana Enslaved (1982), #5: Master of Misfit (1982), #6: Purrfect Plunder (1982), #7: The Manhuntress (1982) with Geo. W. PROCTOR, #8: Under Twin Suns (1982), #9: The Quest of Qalara (1983), #10: The Yoke of Shen (1983) with Proctor, #11: The Iceworld Connection (1983) with Jack C. HALDEMAN II and his wife Vol Haldeman, #12: Star Slaver (1983) with G.C. EDMONDSON, both writing as Cleve, #13: Jonuta Rising! (1983) with Victor KOMAN, #14: Assignment: Hellhole (1983) with Robin Kincaid, #15: Starship Sapphire (1984) with Roland GREEN, #16: The Planet Murderer (1984) with Dwight V. SWAIN, #17: The Carnadyne Horde (1984) with Koman, #18: Race Across the Stars (1984) with Kincaid and #19: King of the Slavers (1985). There are further Cleve erotic novels.As Jeff Douglas: The Balling Machine (1971) with D. Bruce Berry.As J.X. Williams: The Sex Pill (1968).As Editor: The Swords Against Darkness series, comprising Swords Against Darkness (anth 1977; vt Swords Against Darkness I 1990); II (anth 1977); III (anth 1978); IV (anth 1979); V (anth 1979).See also: POLLUTION; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. O'FLINN, PETER [s] R.L. FANTHORPE. O'HARA, KENNETH [s] Bryce WALTON. OHARA, MARIKO [r] JAPAN. O'KEEFE, CLAUDIA (1958- ) US writer, the hero of whose first sf novel, Black Snow Days (1990), has been genetically engineered by his mother to reawaken, 10 years after his fatal car crash, into a post- HOLOCAUST environment he is intended to redeem; the novel rather confusedly puts him through a long quest sequence for a MCGUFFIN Hidden Base which contains the answers to questions he resents having to ask. CO'K has also edited Ghost Tide (anth 1993), mostly originals. [JC] OKUN, LAWRENCE (EUGENE) (1929- ) US medical doctor and writer whose sf novel, On the 8th Day (1980), treats GENETIC ENGINEERING in terms of the PARANOIA it evokes. [JC] OLAN, SUSAN TORIAN (? - ) US writer whose The Earth Remembers (1990) is a cagily written example of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety of post- HOLOCAUST fiction. Set on the Texas-Mexico border, the tale features MUTANTS, Amerindians and nuclear devices along with the usual protagonists and antagonists. [JC] OLANDER, JOSEPH D. (1939- ) US academic and anthologist, all of whose work has been in collaboration with Martin Harry GREENBERG (whom see for details), sometimes plus further collaborators. "Name" authors involved in team anthologies part-edited by JDO are Isaac ASIMOV, Damon KNIGHT, Frederik POHL and Robert SILVERBERG. [JC]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; SOCIOLOGY. OLDMEADOW, ERNEST (JAMES FRANCIS) (1867-1949) UK writer whose 1930s radio work sometimes verged on the fantastic, as in The Town To-Morrow: Five and Twenty Imaginary Broadcasts (coll 1937) as by Francis Downman. His sf novel, The North Sea Bubble: A Fantasia (1906), set in 1910, spoofs the conventions of the future- WAR tale in a manner later amplified by P.G. WODEHOUSE in The Swoop (1909). [JC] OLERICH, HENRY (1851-? ) US author of a series of UTOPIAN novels, some barely fictionalized. A Cityless and Countryless World (1893) fairly vividly presents a highly organized Mars of FEMINIST interest, women there being financially and sexually independent of men. His remaining books - even The Story of the World a Thousand Years Hence (1923) - fatally eschew narrative. [JC]Other works: Modern Paradise (1915); Cause and Cure of the High Cost of Living (1919); The New Life and Future Mating (1927). OLIVER, CHAD Working name of US writer and anthropologist Symmes Chadwick Oliver (1928-1993) for his sf. CO was born in Ohio but spent most of his life in Texas, where he took his MA at the University of Texas (his 1952 thesis, "They Builded a Tower", being an early academic study of sf). He took a PhD in ANTHROPOLOGY from the University of California, Los Angeles, and became professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin; his sf work consistently reflected both his professional training and his place of residence: much of it is set in the outdoors of the US Southwest, and most of his characters are deeply involved in outdoor activities. CO was always concerned with the depiction of Native American life and concerns: The Wolf is My Brother (1967), which is not sf, features a sympathetically characterized Native American protagonist. Most of CO's sf, too, could be thought of as Westerns of the sort that eulogize the land and the people who survive in it. The sf plots that drive his stories - like, in The Winds of Time (1957), the awakening of ALIENS held in SUSPENDED ANIMATION for hundreds of centuries - tend to be resolved in terms that reward a deeply felt longing for a non-urban life closely involved with Nature, though the effect of this is somewhat dissipated by his characteristic inability to prepare for his favourite scenes by adequate plotting, and a tendency (in his earlier works) to pad novelettes to novel length.His first published story, "The Land of Lost Content", appeared in Super Science Stories in 1950; his short work has been collected in Another Kind (coll 1955) and The Edge of Forever (coll 1971), the latter containing biographical material and a checklist compiled by William F. NOLAN. CO's first novel, a juvenile, was Mists of Dawn (1952). Shadows in the Sun (1954), set in Texas, describes with some vividness its protagonist's discovery that all the inhabitants of a small town are aliens, that it may be possible for Earth to gain galactic citizenship, and that he can work for that goal by living an exemplary life on his home planet; Unearthly Neighbors (1960; rev 1984) depicts human attempts to communicate with alien visitors; The Shores of Another Sea (1971) is set in Africa, and articulates CO's concern with the natural world, specifically in terms of ECOLOGY; Giants in the Dust (1976) argues the thesis that mankind's fundamental nature is that of a hunting animal, and that our progress from that condition has fundamentally deracinated us.CO was a pioneer in the application of competent anthropological thought to sf themes, and, though awkward construction sometimes stifled the warmth of his earlier stories, he is a careful author whose speculative thought deserves to be more widely known and appreciated. [JC]Other works: Broken Eagle (1989) and The Cannibal Owl (1994), both Westerns.About the author: Chad Oliver: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (last rev 1989 chap) by Hal W. HALL.See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS; LINGUISTICS; ORIGIN OF MAN; UFOS; VENUS. OLIVER, FREDERICK SPENCER [r] ATLANTIS. OLLIER, CLAUDE [r] FRANCE. OLSA, JAROSLAV Jr (1964- ) Student of Arabic and Oriental studies and international relations; also sf editor, translator and bibliographer. JO was for a time assistant editor of the first Czechoslovak sf monthly magazine, Ikarie (published since 1990), but his major role in sf studies has been as co-editor of the Czechoslovak Encyklopedie science fiction ["Encyclopedia of Science Fiction"] (1992). He has contributed to LOCUS, FOUNDATION and other sf magazines, has compiled bibliographies of Czechoslovak FANZINES, and wrote the entry on CZECH AND SLOVAK SF for this encyclopedia. [PN] OLSEN, BOB Working name of US writer Alfred John Olsen Jr (1884-1956), who began publishing sf with "The Four Dimensional Roller Press" for AMZ in 1927; this was the first of several tales in the Four Dimensional sequence. Other tales featured Professor Archimedes Banning, whose exploits were patterned on the model of the EDISONADE. One story, Rhythm Rides the Rocket (1940 chap), was published in booklet form, but BO was a born PULP-MAGAZINE writer, and lost interest in the field after about 1940. [JC]See also: GREAT AND SMALL; HIVE-MINDS. OLTION, JERRY B. (1957- ) US writer who began publishing sf in 1982 with "Much Ado About Nothing" for ASF, the journal which published a high proportion of the 25 or so stories he wrote in the 1980s, many of which appear in Love Songs of a Mad Scientist: The Collected Stories of Jerry Oltion Volume One (coll 1993). His first novel, Frame of Reference (1987), is a POCKET-UNIVERSE tale whose human protagonists discover, while growing up and falling in love, that the starship they live in is actually a simulacrum hidden underground and that the ALIENS on the surface of the Earth deserve a strict comeuppance, which they soon get. JBO then published two Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens ties: #4: Alliance * (1990) and #6: Humanity * (1990). [JC]Other Works:The Gigantic Three in One Complete History of the Universe (1994 chap) with A.B.Newcomer. O'MALLEY, KATHLEEN [r] A.C. CRISPIN. OMEGA MAN, THE Film (1971). Warner Bros. Dir Boris Sagal, starring Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash. Screenplay John William Corrington, Joyce H. Corrington, based on I Am Legend (1954) by Richard MATHESON. 98 mins. Colour.This is the second film version of Matheson's ultra- PARANOIA novel, the first being L' ULTIMO UOMO DELLA TERRA (1964; vt The Last Man on Earth). "The first one was very poorly done," said Matheson, himself a screenwriter, "but it did follow the book. The Omega Man bore no resemblance to my book . . . I had absolutely nothing to do with the screenplay." A survivor of a biological war battles (with a machine gun rather than Matheson's sharpened stakes) against a group of mutated, albino fanatics haunting the almost dead city. The film sacrifices the claustrophobia and nightmare of the novel for fast-moving action. The true cinematic heir to Matheson's story, though not directly based on it, is the far superior NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). [JB/PN] OMEGA SCIENCE DIGEST Australian popular-science magazine, small- BEDSHEET size, publishing an average of 2 sf stories per issue; 37 bimonthly issues Jan/Feb 1981-Jan/Feb 1987, ed Philip Gore. The parent magazine was the US Science Digest, discontinued at around the same time. Though unexceptional as a science magazine, OSD was, with a circulation around 35,000, for 6 years the most important publisher of Australian short sf, printing 78 stories by Australian authors, illustrated by Australian artists such as Mark McLeod, Tony Pyrzakowski and Frantz Cantor. Authors included Russell BLACKFORD, Damien BRODERICK, Simon Brown, Sean MCMULLEN, Jack WODHAMS and, perhaps most notably, Terry DOWLING, whose popular stories in OSD attracted much local notice. [PN] OMNI US popular-science magazine which includes fiction; monthly, current to April 1995 but (see below) slick, small- BEDSHEET size, #1 Oct 1978, published by Omni Publications International, New York.Because it has a high circulation - at times topping 1 million - and because it pays the highest rates for fiction, Omni has a prestige in sf circles out of proportion to the actual number of stories it publishes (seldom more than 2 per issue, 1 per issue through most of the early 1990s). Founded by Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine as a sister periodical, O has been one of the big success stories of US MAGAZINE publishing: lavishly illustrated in colour, publishing science articles ranging from the demanding through the gosh-wow to features on only marginally scientific, sometimes New-Age subjects like parapsychology and UFOS, O does not depend on fiction for its sales, and has been fortunate in having fiction editors who have kept the standard quite high; they have been Ben BOVA (Oct 1978-Dec 1979), Robert SHECKLEY (Jan 1980-Sep 1981) and Ellen DATLOW (Oct 1981-current). Bova was also executive editor Jan 1980-Aug 1981; the present executive editor is Keith Ferrell, an sf enthusiast who is soliciting more nonfiction from sf writers, thus increasing the sf presence in the magazine.However, circulation figures kept dropping from the peak in 1988 of over one million. In Oct 1992 Omni changed from perfectbound to staplebound. In that same year most of the staff (but not Datlow) was moved to North Carolina. There were only 11 issues in 1993, but they included the enormous 15th-anniversary Oct 1993 issue, which published Harlan ELLISON's "Mefisto in Onyx". Circulation rose a little in 1994, but it was still down 25% on the 1988 figures. The difficulties came to a head in March 1995 when it was announced that Omni as a monthly would change to electronic publishing, to be available as Omni Online through America Online. The printed version would continue as a quarterly available through newsstands only, all subscriptions being cancelled. Datlow would continue as fiction editor.O's fiction has, interestingly, not put a high premium on hard science; indeed, especially in later years, it has often published SCIENCE FANTASY, pure FANTASY and MAINSTREAM fiction with a small sf twist to it. This has been attributed (1991) by Datlow to the higher quality overall of fantasy submissions relative to sf submissions, rather than to any change of policy. As fiction editor, Datlow has pulled in the big names but also done much for the careers of novice writers. For example, Ted Chiang's novelette "Tower of Babylon" (Omni 1990), his first story, won a NEBULA. Among the other award-winning Omni novelettes and short stories have been "Sandkings" (1979) by George R.R. MARTIN ( HUGO and Nebula), "The Way of Cross and Dragon" (1979) also by Martin (Hugo), "Morning Child" (1984) by Gardner DOZOIS (Nebula), "Tangents" (1986) by Greg BEAR (Hugo and Nebula), "Permafrost" (1986) by Roger ZELAZNY (Hugo), "Schrodinger's Kitten" (1988) by George Alec EFFINGER (Hugo and Nebula) and "At the Rialto" (1989) by Connie WILLIS (Nebula). Omni has also published work of some literary distinction by Thomas M. DISCH and John CROWLEY, supported the eccentric talent of Howard WALDROP and the CYBERPUNK of William GIBSON and Bruce STERLING, and generally had an honourable, imaginative publishing record. Although Datlow is on record as liking very much some stories she would still not accept for Omni, she seems to have made remarkably few concessions, in O's fiction, to its mass-market audience.A UK version, Omni: Book of the Future, featuring new UK material and US reprints, ed Jack Schofield, was test-launched as a weekly partwork in Nov 1981 in the UK West Country by Eaglemoss Publications; it lasted only 4 weeks and never received national distribution.Anthologies based on Omni are The Best of Omni Science Fiction (anth 1980) ed Bova and Don Myrus, #2 (anth 1981) ed Bova and Myrus, #3 (anth 1982) ed Bova and Myrus, #4 (anth 1982) ed Bova and Myrus, #5 (anth 1983) ed Myrus, #6 (anth 1983) ed Myrus-all but the first of these containing original fiction in addition to reprints - The First Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1983) ed Datlow, The Second Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1983) ed Datlow, The Third Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1985) ed Datlow, The Fourth Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1985) ed Datlow, The Fifth Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1987; includes 1 original story) ed Datlow, The Sixth Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1989; includes 1 original story) ed Datlow and The Seventh Omni Book of Science Fiction (anth 1989; includes 1 original story) ed Datlow. [PN] OMPA Known usually by its acronym, the Offtrail Magazine Publishers Association (1954-78/79) was formed in the UK by Kenneth BULMER, A. Vincent Clarke and Chuck Harris. OMPA was modelled on FAPA, and was founded to facilitate distribution of FANZINES published by and for members. Early contributors included John BRUNNER and Michael MOORCOCK. Uniquely for an APA, OMPA once organized a national convention, Ompacon, the 1973 UK Eastercon. [PR/RH] O'NEAL, KATHLEEN M. Kathleen O'Neal GEAR. 1 APRIL 2000 AUSTRIA. ONE HOUR TO DOOMSDAY CITY BENEATH THE SEA. O'NEILL, GERARD K. [r] LAGRANGE POINT; SPACE HABITATS. O'NEILL, JOSEPH (1886-1953) Irish educationist and novelist; Permanent Secretary to the Department of Education, Irish Free State, 1923-44; author of 3 sf novels. Wind from the North (1934) is only marginally sf, its narrator passing through a timeslip to give a vivid account of Dublin under Viking rule in AD1013. JO turned to sf proper with Land under England (1935), a DYSTOPIA in a LOST-WORLD setting: in a cave system beneath Cumberland, descendants of the Roman Army suffer a totalitarian state in which individualism is completely obliterated by telepathic means. The introduction by AE assumed that the book was a SATIRE on Hitlerian totalitarianism, an impression confirmed with the appearance of Day of Wrath (1936), a future- WAR novel which describes the destruction of civilization by advanced aircraft following a coalition between Germany, Japan and China. JO was not a GENRE-SF writer; rather, he used sf instruments to make cultural and political points. His eloquence was considerable. [JE]See also: OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POLITICS. O'NEILL, SCOTT [r] Barton WERPER. ONE MILLION B.C. (vt Man and his Mate) Film (1940). Hal Roach/United Artists. Dir Hal Roach and Hal Roach Jr, starring Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Lon Chaney Jr. Screenplay Mickell Novak, George Baker, Joseph Frickert, based on a story by Eugene Roche. 85 mins, cut to 80 mins. B/w.In this not very distinguished prehistoric Romeo-and-Juliet soap opera a young caveman is exiled from the family cave and meets a girl from a rival tribe; together they face various prehistoric hazards, including an earthquake and an erupting volcano. Photographically enlarged lizards wearing rubber disguises play the anachronistic dinosaurs, and an elephant wearing a woolly coat stands in for a mammoth. D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) worked on portions of the film, but resigned in anger at the decision not to have the cavepeople speak modern English. The UK remake was ONE MILLION YEARS BC (1966). [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA. ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. Film (1966). Hammer/20th Century-Fox. Dir Don Chaffey, starring Raquel Welch, John Richardson, Robert Brown, Martine Beswick. Screenplay Michael Carreras, based on the screenplay of ONE MILLION B.C. (1940). 100 mins. Colour.The first of Hammer's several stone-age movies (see also WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH), this is a remake of One Million B.C.. Prehistoric lovers from different scantily clad tribes, the rock people and the shell people - some loony ANTHROPOLOGY here - survive warfare, anachronistic monsters, unconvincing fur brassieres and volcanic upheavals. Ray HARRYHAUSEN - this time not working with his usual colleague Charles Schneer - was in charge of the monsters which are, indeed, animated. [PN/JB] ONN, CARRIE Robert E. VARDEMAN. ON SPEC Canadian SEMIPROZINE, #1 Spring 1989, slightly irregular quarterly since 1991,current,eighteen issues to Fall 1994, pub The Copper Pig Collective from Edmonton, ed Barry Hammond,Susan MacGregor, Hazel Sangster, Jena Snyder and Diane L. Walton, DIGEST, perfect bound,around 96pp. With quite a low circulation that perhaps should qualify it only as a FANZINE, inother respects including the quality of its stories and the artwork of its covers OSis a fairly professional venture. Most writers - Robert Boyczuk and Alice Major for example - arecomparatively unknown, but well-known authors like Charles DE LINT, Dave DUNCAN, Spider ROBINSON and Robert J. SAWYER also occasionally contribute fiction. Most issues containsome poetry. [PN] ON THE BEACH Film (1959). Lomitas Productions/United Artists. Dir Stanley Kramer, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, Guy Doleman. Screenplay John Paxton, based on On the Beach (1957) by Nevil SHUTE. 134 mins. B/w.1964, the NEAR FUTURE: only Australia has survived a global nuclear war. This merely prolongs the agony: a cloud of radioactive fallout is moving south and everyone will die. Suicide pills are handed out; people face death (or run to meet it) with varying degrees of dignity, though tears are shed; big-name Hollywood stars (the plot provides reasons for the number of Americans facing the end in Melbourne) look anguished; the wind blows newspapers through empty streets. OTB was the most celebrated of the 1950s anti-Bomb films, heavily publicized, much discussed, seen as Art, and certainly effective propaganda in the Cold-War nuclear-weapons debate. It has not weathered well; seen today it appears slow, mawkish, ludicrously stiff-upper-lip, and unrealistic in a sanitized middle-class way: no riots, no looting, just chaps feeling miserable and driving racing cars in a reckless manner. The Australian legend that Ava Gardner, while shooting, looked around and said of Melbourne "What a great place to make a movie about the end of the world" is untrue. Peter NICHOLLS appeared in a crowd scene. [PN] OPEN UNIVERSE In cosmology an open universe is a model of the Universe which implies that it will continue to expand forever; in this general sense, the term is found incidentally in many sf novels. However, sf readers also use it in a quite different meaning: to designate a work or series whose characters and venues may be made use of by fans and others in FANZINES without copyright restrictions (although the original authors do sometimes impose constraints). The best known open universes are probably STAR TREK and Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Darkover.A cognate use of the term, to designate works or series whose authors invite other professional authors to participate, is perhaps deceptive. Open universes of this sort, from H. P. LOVECRAFT's Cthulhu to Michael MOORCOCK's Jerry Cornelius, are perhaps more appropriately thought of as a kind of SHARED WORLD. [JC] OPERA MUSIC; THEATRE. OPERATION GANYMED Film (1977). Pentagrama/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Written/dir Rainer Erler, starring Horst Frank, Dieter Laser, Uwe Friedrichsen, Jurgen Prochnow, Claud Theo Gaestner, Vicky Roskilly. 126 mins, cut to 120 mins. Colour.This grim German film emerges as a realist response to fantasies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968). On their return to Earth, 5 survivors of a 3-ship, 21-man mission to Ganymede crashland off the Gulf of Mexico and, lost in the desert, turn to madness, murder, cannibalism and guilt-ridden introspection as they wonder whether humanity has been wiped out by a nuclear war. During the mission, as we discover in flashbacks, the astronauts discovered ALIEN microorganisms which caused a plague among them, but it turns out that Earth is the harshest environment of all, as the final survivor straggles back to an unchanged, uncaring civilization. Concerned with the ethical issues of space travel-whether the expenditure results in an improved earthly standard of living or not - this is a talky and melodramatic film, but intermittently powerful. Erler's other sf films, mainly for the German tv company ZDF which cofinanced this one, include Das Genie ["The Genius"] (1974), Plutonium (1978) and Fleisch ["Flesh"] (1979). [KN] OPERATION MONSTERLAND GOJIRA; RADON. OPERATOR #5 US PULP MAGAZINE, 48 issues, Apr 1934-Nov/Dec 1939, published by Popular Publications; ed Rogers Terrill, it began as a monthly and then alternated between bimonthly and monthly. This was one of the livelier and more successful hero/villain pulps, and more sciencefictional than most. Operator #5 was secret agent Jimmy Christopher, whose assignment, in the lead novel every issue, was to save the USA from destruction by various menaces (often superscientific) and unfriendly powers (frequently Asiatic). The lead novels were published under the house name Curtis STEELE, which concealed the highly prolific pulp writer Frederick C. DAVIS (Apr 1934-Nov 1935), then Emile Tepperman (Dec 1935-Mar 1938), and lastly Wayne Rogers. Other features included a series of spy stories by Arthur Leo ZAGAT. 13 of the early lead novels, all the work of Davis, were reprinted as paperback books ( Frederick C. DAVIS for details). [MJE/FHP/PN] OPPENHEIM, E(DWARD) PHILLIPS (1866-1946) UK writer, publishing from 1887 at least 160 novels, most of them espionage thrillers or society detective mysteries, the best known being The Great Impersonation (1920). His sf novels of interest - most of the titles listed below are romantic-fantasy potboilers - include The Wrath to Come (1924 US), in which the USA is threatened by a 1940s German-Russian-Japanese axis, Gabriel Samara, Peacemaker (1925 US; vt Gabriel Samara 1925 UK; vt Exit a Dictator 1939 US), in which the Russian government is overthrown, and The Dumb Gods Speak (1937), a novel set in the future and involving high intrigue and a secret weapon. EPO was a careless, clumsy, snobbish, quite enjoyable writer of escapist fiction. [JC]Other works: The Mysterious Mr Sabin (1898); A Daughter of Astrea (1898); The Traitors (1902); The Great Awakening (1902; vt A Sleeping Memory 1902 US); The Secret (1907); Havoc (1911); The Falling Star (1911 US); The Double Life of Mr Alfred Burton (1913 US); The Black Box (1915 US); The Great Prince Shan (1922 US); The Golden Beast (1926 US); Matorni's Vineyard (1928 US); The Adventures of Mr Joseph P. Cray (1929); Up the Ladder of Gold (1931 US); The Spy Paramount (1935); Mr Mirakel (1943 US). OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM In the most simplistic version of the HISTORY OF SF, sf was always (and rightly) an optimistic literature until the NEW WAVE came along in the 1960s and spoiled everything. This was at best a very partial truth, being only remotely applicable to GENRE SF and not at all to MAINSTREAM sf.In the mainstream, not even the work of individual authors could be categorized as simply either optimistic or pessimistic. Both Jules VERNE and H.G. WELLS took a darker view of the future as they became older; indeed, Wells's vision described almost a parabola: between THE TIME MACHINE (1895), a novel of evolutionary futility, and Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), from 1905 through the 1920s his portraits of the future were generally UTOPIAN. The favourite themes of sf outside the genre magazines have always included DYSTOPIA, INVASION, future WAR, and the HOLOCAUST AFTER, and the stories have often taken the form of dire warnings or a generalized philosophical bleakness aimed at demonstrating humanity's predilection for getting itself into trouble. Olaf STAPLEDON envisaged, in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), an ultimate harmony in the Universe, but one achieved only after a prolonged variety of evolutionary torments.By contrast, sf in the PULP MAGAZINES was mostly cheerful, especially after Hugo GERNSBACK founded AMAZING STORIES in 1926. Gernsback proselytized actively for technological optimism, and this, despite many exceptions - including several stories by John W. CAMPBELL Jr, writing as Don A Stuart, which evoked an atmosphere of moody desolation - remained the dominant tone of sf until the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Campbell, as editor of ASF, normally required a constructive attitude towards science from his contributors, but, though writers like Robert A. HEINLEIN were temperamentally inclined to oblige, even before 1945 the typical ASF story was by no means mindlessly cheery, and many of the stories showed a strong awareness of possible technological DISASTER.After the advent of the Bomb ( NUCLEAR POWER) it was no longer possible to see the applications of science as an unmixed blessing. Also working against optimism were the Cold War and its domestic effect in the USA: the suspicious atmosphere (approaching PARANOIA) prevalent from the early 1950s (shown notably in the anti-communist scares) probably helped to change the focus of interest of many sf stories from TECHNOLOGY to SOCIOLOGY and POLITICS. The magazine GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION specialized in a form of social SATIRE best exemplified by THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1952 as "Gravy Planet"; 1953) by C.M. KORNBLUTH and Frederik POHL; this type of story created its future scenario with a distinct cynicism, but its narrative tone was similar to that of most pulp sf, cheerful and hardbitten, with no such strong sense of horror and disgust as could be found outside the genre in novels like George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949).But any categorization of sf stories into the optimistic and the pessimistic is so imprecise as not to be greatly useful, and indeed there would be no point in discussing the subject were it not that sf critics with backgrounds in 1930s and 1940s FANDOM have often regarded the optimism/pessimism split as of grave importance. Just such a distinction has also been made in several histories of sf, such as Donald A. WOLLHEIM's The Universe Makers (1971), and it is implicit in much of the work of Sam MOSKOWITZ. The work of Clifford D. SIMAK is relevant as an example of the difficulties in such a categorization: his stories regularly revolve around reconciliation and the achievement of some kind of harmony between Technological Man and Nature (hence optimistic), but his tone, as in CITY (fixup 1952), is often elegiac and nostalgic (hence pessimistic).A distinction with some truth is often made between US sf, as typically outward-thrusting and riding the momentum of the old myth of the Frontier, and the UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE, which, perhaps as a result of imperial power giving way rapidly to global impotence, was far more inclined to expect DISASTER. But this was never more than a gross generalization (though truer of UK sf than of US sf); nor did it take into account the guileless pleasure the British took in disaster. Could anything so enjoyable be called pessimism? Now that, in the 1990s, the world economic hegemony of the USA is threatened by financial weakness and domestic problems, as happened in the UK much earlier, it will be interesting to observe what sociological reflections appear in US sf of the later 1990s.It was only in the middle and late 1960s, with the advent of the so-called New Wave, that real anger and sometimes despair about the future of humanity became quite commonplace in genre sf. But the writers of the New Wave, even though their attitudes sometimes appeared anarchic, were seldom passively acceptant of a dark view; the dominant New-Wave metaphor may have been of ENTROPY, of things running down, but the fierce commitment of, say, Harlan ELLISON or Brian W. ALDISS could not be airily dismissed as "pessimism" by any but the crudest of critics. Aldiss has many times inveighed in print against what he regards as the strong moral pressure, found especially in some US publishing houses, to legislate for a kind of mandatory optimism. The casual insertion of a happy ending or a few improving messages no more constitutes true optimism than an awareness of the difficulties of life either now or in the future constitutes true pessimism.Poets have many times argued that an awareness of death gives a sharper edge to love; just so, the darker elements which have entered sf since 1945, and especially since the mid-1960s, have been argued as redressing a balance without which sf could never have reached maturity as a genre. The good sf writer often mediates between simplistic extremes of optimism and pessimism, and his mode of mediation is often irony: one meaning of this complex word has been defined as "an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected". The ironist is not just somebody sarcastic or even somebody who expects the worst: he or she is somebody who understands the multitude of possibilities concealed in apparently straightforward events, does not take anything at face value, and (at best) embraces the largeness and unpredictability of things (at worst being merely knowing). Notable sf ironists have included J.G. BALLARD, Alfred BESTER, Algis BUDRYS, Philip K. DICK, Thomas M. DISCH, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Michael MOORCOCK and, more recently, Iain M. BANKS, John CROWLEY, William GIBSON, James TIPTREE Jr. and Gene WOLFE. To read the more painful or rueful aspects of their work as simple pessimism is to read inaccurately.Indeed the whole question of optimism and pessimism in sf seems far less pressing today than it did when the first edition of this encyclopedia was published in 1979, with the residual echoes of the New-Wave debate still audible. While the entropic introspection ( INNER SPACE) of the New Wave is no longer characteristic of any but a few writers, the old certitudes of SPACE OPERA (the Universe is ours for the taking, just so long as we're inventive and self-reliant) are likewise long gone. Writers of HARD SF from the 1980s - Greg BEAR, David BRIN, Orson Scott CARD, Paul J. MCAULEY, Michael SWANWICK and others - no longer portray the Universe as waiting voluptuously to be had. The extremes of optimism and pessimism have disappeared; perhaps, except for purposes of tub-thumping argument, they were never there in the first place. [PN] OR, L' GOLD. ORAM, NEIL (1938- ) UK writer whose involvement in sf was restricted to the 3 vols of his The Warp sequence of metaphysical adventures - The Storm's Howling through Tiflis (1980), Lemmings on the Edge (1981) and The Balustrade Paradox (1982) - which novelize his 22-hour, 10-play cycle, The Warp, performed in London in 1979, dir Ken Campbell. The sequence, after the manner of the Illuminatus! books by Robert SHEA and Robert Anton WILSON, features world conspiracies, ley energies, reincarnated searchers for the key to unlock occult mysteries, and so forth. [JC] ORBAN Working name of US illustrator Paul Orban (?1896-?1974). He executed 7 covers and many interior ILLUSTRATIONS for a remarkable number of magazines (1933-60), including If, Future, Space Science Fiction and The Shadow, but is mostly associated in readers' minds with the 1940s ASF, where he did many of the interior illustrations 1933-54. His black-and-white work was often symbolic of a story rather than directly representational, regularly placing faces or figures over geometrical abstractions and using bold cross-hatching; it was always competent and sometimes more. Brian W. ALDISS has called O "an incurable romantic in a field of incurable romantics". [JG/PN] ORBIT Seminal US ORIGINAL-ANTHOLOGY series ed Damon KNIGHT. Although Orbit was not the first such series, having been preceded by STAR SCIENCE FICTION STORIES in the USA and NEW WRITINGS IN SF in the UK, it was its extraordinary early success that precipitated the boom in such series in the early 1970s. It had a more literary orientation than the sf magazines, and perhaps for this reason was especially popular with the active members of the newly formed SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. For whatever cause, stories from Orbit dominated the NEBULA awards in their early years, although none has ever won a HUGO. Orbit 1 (anth 1966) contained "The Secret Place" by Richard MCKENNA, which won the short-story Nebula. Orbit 3 (anth 1968) featured 2 Nebula-winning stories: "Mother to the World" by Richard WILSON and "The Planners" by Kate WILHELM. Orbit 4 (anth 1968) contained another winner in "Passengers" by Robert SILVERBERG. That was the last Orbit story to win an award, although the year of pervasive dominance was 1970, when between them Orbit 6 (anth 1970) and Orbit 7 (anth 1970) provided 1 of the 5 novellas on the final Nebula ballot, 3 of the 6 novelettes, and 6 of the 7 short stories. Three writers in particular became associated with ORBIT, and remained its most regular contributors: R.A. LAFFERTY, Wilhelm and Gene WOLFE; in the run of 21 volumes, Lafferty and Wilhelm had 19 stories each, and Wolfe 18. Orbit lost its dominance once the flood of competitors appeared, and with #14 had to change publishers (becoming confined to a hardcover edition in the process) in order to survive. Notable stories in later volumes include Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" in Orbit 10 (anth 1972), Ursula K. LE GUIN's "The Stars Below" in Orbit 14 (anth 1974) - which also contained Joan D. VINGE's debut story - and Wilhelm's "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" in Orbit 15 (anth 1974). Orbit was especially notable for stories that seemed at the time odd and sui generis, quite unlike the usual run of GENRE SF and fantasy, but with hindsight were early signs of a general sophistication of genre sf in the 1970s, in which this series at first played a vital role; later numbers became rather insipid. Other volumes in the series are Orbit 2 (anth 1967), Orbit 5 (anth 1969), Orbit 8 (anth 1970), Orbit 9 (anth 1971), Orbit 11 (anth 1972), Orbit 12 (anth 1973), Orbit 13 (anth 1974), Orbit 16 (anth 1975), Orbit 17 (anth 1975), Orbit 18 (anth 1976), Orbit 19 (anth 1977), Orbit 20 (anth 1978) and Orbit 21 (anth 1980). The Best From Orbit (anth 1977) is culled from the first 10 vols. [MJE/PN] ORBIT SCIENCE FICTION US DIGEST-size magazine. 5 issues 1953-Nov/Dec 1954, first 2 undated, published by Hanro Corp., New York; ed Jules Saltman. OSF was a middling-quality magazine that fell victim to the inundation of the market with too many sf magazines in the early 1950s. A story in the Tex Harrigan series by August DERLETH appeared in every issue, and #5 contained "Adjustment Team" by Philip K. DICK. All stories were chosen by Donald A. WOLLHEIM, uncredited. A cut 1954 Australian edition of #1 only, in pulp format, was published by Consolidated Press, Sydney. [FHP/PN] ORCZY, BARONESS Working name of Hungarian-born UK author and illustrator Baroness Emmuska (variously Emma or Emulka) Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy (1865-1947). After magazine work as an illustrator, she came to fame with The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). Her sf novel, By the Gods Beloved (1905; vt The Gates of Kamt 1907 US), is a LOST-WORLD tale set in the desert, where ancient Egyptians engage in sexual intrigues and politics. [JC] ORDE, A.J. Sheri S. TEPPER. ORE, REBECCA Pseudonym of US writer Rebecca B. Brown (1948- ), who began publishing sf with "Projectile Weapons and Wild Alien Water" for AMZ in 1986 and is best known for Becoming Alien (1988) and its sequels, Being Alien (1989) and Human to Human (1990), a sequence which - with a deceptive air of leisureliness - takes a young rural Virginian named Tom from the provincial backwaters of xenophobic Earth to another planet where, as the solitary human among a multitude of other races, he is trained to join, on behalf of Earth, the Federation of Space Traveling Systems. A very wide range of ALIENS is introduced in a concise but seemingly disorganized cataloguing style which has reminded critics of Stanley G. WEINBAUM's "A Martian Odyssey" (1934); but, as the sequence progresses, the momentum of the tale builds, and RO's apparently scattershot concisions turn out to have been carefully meditated. The end sense, as Tom grows into knowledge of himself and of his prejudice-stricken fellow humans, is one of complexities experienced. More immediately impressive, perhaps, is a singleton, The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid (1991), in which a CIA specialist in DNA-recombinant engineering ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) creates a CLONE - or chimera - of Billy the Kid whose "memories" of the 19th century have been programmed into his blank brain, and whose perceptions are controlled by a "nineteenth-century visual matrix" that causes him to read 21st-century sights in terms of Billy's own experiences. The story of this chimera's slow and anguished climb into self-awareness, and of his escape to a rural Appalachian theme-parked reservation, is swift and urgently dense in the telling, fragilely hopeful in its implications. As of 1991, RO herself lived in Appalachia, and the ironies attendent upon inhabiting a contrived sanctuary enrich an already rich text. Her stories, which are strong and varied, appear in Alien Bootlegger (coll 1993); Slow Funeral (1994) is a contemporary fantasy which evocatively crosshatches supernatural material into the American scene. [JC] O'REILLY, JOHN BOYLE (1844-1890) Irish-born US writer. A Fenian transported to Australia, he escaped to the USA and became a journalist, poet and novelist. His sf novel about a republican England, The King's Men: A Tale of Tomorrow (1884) with Robert GRANT, F.J. Stimson and John T. Wheelwright, features an attempted monarchist coup which is roundly defeated. [JC] ORGILL, DOUGLAS (WILLIAM) [r] John GRIBBIN. ORIGINAL ANTHOLOGIES An original ANTHOLOGY is an anthology in book format of stories that have not been previously published, and such volumes played an important role in sf PUBLISHING, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. This encyclopedia gives entries to original-anthology series devoted to sf and (with one exception, Dangerous Visions) running to 3 or more vols; we do not give separate entries for shared-world anthology series ( SHARED WORLDS for examples) with the exception of Wild Cards. There are 19 such entries: The BERKLEY SHOWCASE , CHRYSALIS, DANGEROUS VISIONS, FULL SPECTRUM, INFINITY, INTERZONE: THE ANTHOLOGY (original only in part), L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE, NEW DIMENSIONS, NEW VOICES, NEW WRITINGS IN SF, NOVA, ORBIT, OTHER EDENS, QUARK, STAR SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, STELLAR, SYNERGY, UNIVERSE and WILD CARDS. (We classify some further original-anthology series in book format as magazines, when they so describe themselves; these include DESTINIES and PULPHOUSE: THE HARDBACK MAGAZINE.) [PN] ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION STORIES, THE US DIGEST-size magazine, 38 issues, 1953-May 1960. Published by Columbia Publications; ed Robert A.W. LOWNDES. A companion magazine to FUTURE FICTION and SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY, TOSFS began life as a one-shot simply entitled Science Fiction Stories, though some commentators see this as a mere continuation, after a gap, of the magazine SCIENCE FICTION (1939-41), also ed Lowndes. #2 followed in 1954, and the magazine commenced regular publication in Jan 1955. The Sep 1955 issue added an advertising slogan, "The Original", to the title on the cover, and the magazine subsequently became known by that name, although technically its title remained Science Fiction Stories. Like its companion magazines, TOSFS existed on a very small editorial budget but maintained a respectable, if largely mediocre, level of quality, a little better perhaps than its stable companion Future Fiction. Serialized novels included The Tower of Zanid (1958) by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Caduceus Wild (1959 TOSFS; 1978) by Ward MOORE and Robert Bradford. Robert SILVERBERG was the magazine's most prolific contributor. R.A. LAFFERTY made his debut here with "Day of the Glacier" (1960). The numeration of this cluster of magazines was very complex, and can be found explained in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction Magazines (1985) ed Marshall B. TYMN and Mike ASHLEY (in their article on Science Fiction, as they prefer to treat TOSFS as a continuation of that journal). After its demise in May 1960 the title was bought by fan James V. Taurasi ( FANTASY TIMES), who used it on 3 SEMIPROZINE issues - little more than FANZINES, in fact - in BEDSHEET format in Dec 1961, Winter 1962 and Winter 1963. The UK abridged reprint edition (1957-60) had 12 numbers. [MJE/FHP/PN] ORIGIN OF MAN An abundant literature dealing with the remote ancestry of the human species inevitably sprang up in the wake of the theory of EVOLUTION, as propounded by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), the principal champion of Darwinism, published a classic essay on "Man's Place in Nature" (1863), and Darwin himself wrote The Descent of Man (1871) soon after. The main point at issue was, as Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) put it, "the question of whether Man is an ape or an angel". Disraeli was on the side of the angels, but science and serious speculative fiction were not; their main interest was in how Man had ceased to be a brute beast and become human.Huxley took a rather harsh view of the process of natural selection, and so did his one-time pupil, H.G. WELLS, whose "A Story of the Stone Age" (1897) envisages the crucial moment in human evolution as the invention of a "new club" - a better means to cut and kill. This view recurs constantly, being memorably envisaged in Stanley KUBRICK's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), in which the dawn of intelligence occurs as an ape realizes that the bone he uses to smash other bones can also be used as, among other things, a WEAPON. Darwin presented a rather different account, stressing the positive value of cooperation and mutual protection in the struggle for existence. This stress on cooperative emotions as well as physical inventions is found in such works as Jack LONDON's Before Adam (1906), although previous, more religiously inclined authors had represented the origins of humanity in purely spiritual terms; Gouverneur MORRIS's The Pagan's Progress (1904) is an example. The domestication of fire was also widely seen as the crucial invention, notably in Stanley WATERLOO's The Story of Ab (1897), in Charles Henry Robinson's Longhead: The Story of the First Fire (1913), and in the most famous novel by the most prolific author of prehistoric fantasies, J.H. ROSNY aine's La guerre du feu (1909; cut trans as The Quest for Fire 1967). Rosny's prehistoric stories - which include Vamireh (1892), Eyrimah (1893), Le felin geant (1918; trans 1924 as The Giant Cat 1924 US; vt Quest of the Dawn Man 1964) and Helgvor de Fleuve Bleu ["Helgvor of the Blue River"] (1930) - inspired numerous works by other French writers, including Marcel Schwob's "The Death of Odjigh" (1892; trans 1982), Claude ANET's La fin d'un monde (1925; trans as The End of a World 1927) and Max BEGOUEN's Les bisons d'argile (1925; trans as Bison of Clay 1926).The Huxleyan account of human nature was comprehensively rejected by two UK writers in SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES that glorified the innocent state of Nature and blamed civilization for all human ills: S. Fowler WRIGHT in Dream, or The Simian Maid (1929) and its intended sequel The Vengeance of Gwa (1935) (as by Anthony Wingrave) and J. Leslie MITCHELL in the polemical Three Go Back (1932) and the lyrical "The Woman of Leadenhall Street" (1936) as by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Similar nostalgia for a prehistoric Golden Age is displayed in William GOLDING's The Inheritors (1955), though Golding follows Wright rather than Mitchell in refusing to grant innocence to Man's direct ancestors, and presents a more brutal view of prehistoric life in "Clonk Clonk" (1971). All these works are, in part, admonitory fables, and by natural exaggeration prehistoric fantasies have also been employed for SATIRE, as in Andrew LANG's "The Romance of the First Radical" (1886), Henry Curwen's Zit and Xoe (1887), W.D. Locke's "The Story of Oo-oo" (1926) and Roy LEWIS's What We Did to Father (1960: vt The Evolution Man 1963; vt Once upon an Ice Age 1979).There have been several attempts to write novels on a vast scale which link prehistory and history to provide a "whole" account of the "spirit of Man". The most impressive is Den Lange Rejse (1908-22 Denmark; trans as The Long Journey 1922-4; omni 1933) by the Danish Nobel prizewinner Johannes V. JENSEN, the first two parts of which are prehistoric fantasies. A work on an even greater scale is the Testament of Man series by Vardis FISHER, a 12-novel series of which the first 4 vols are prehistoric fantasies. Also in this tradition is Les enchainements (1925; trans as Chains 1925) by Henri BARBUSSE, while more trivial examples include The Invincible Adam (1932) by George S. VIERECK and Paul ELDRIDGE and Tomorrow (coll of linked stories 1930) by F. Britten AUSTIN, who also wrote a volume of prehistoric short stories, When Mankind was Young (coll 1927). The attempt to find in the evolutionary history of Man some sequence of events for which the Genesis myth might be considered a metaphor - a key theme of Fisher's novels - is such an attractive notion that it has infected anthropological theory as well as speculative fantasy. Austin BIERBOWER's From Monkey to Man (1894) offers a simpler account of a metaphorical expulsion from Eden. A fierce reaction against such superstitions can be found in The Sons of the Mammoth (trans 1929) by the Russian anthropologist V.G. BOGORAZ.In the US PULP MAGAZINES there grew up a romantic school of prehistoric fiction glorifying the life of the savage. Its most prolific proponent was Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, author of the Pellucidar series, The Eternal Lover (1914; 1925; vt The Eternal Savage) and The Cave Girl (1913-17; 1925). Novels from outside the pulps, however, often show a similar if more muted romanticism. Examples include most of Jack London's stories in this vein, Sir Charles G.D. ROBERTS's In the Morning of Time (1919), H. Rider HAGGARD's Allan and the Ice-Gods (1927) and Richard TOOKER's The Day of the Brown Horde (1929). Prehistoric romances in the CINEMA, which are notorious for their anachronisms, are perhaps the extreme examples of the romantic school, from D.W. Griffith's Man's Genesis (1911) onwards. Although Hugo GERNSBACK reprinted Wells's "A Story of the Stone Age", GENRE SF did not really take prehistoric fantasy aboard, with notable exceptions including Lester DEL REY's "When Day is Done" (1939), Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Greatest Invention" (1951), Chad OLIVER's juvenile Mists of Dawn (1952) and Theodore L. THOMAS's "The Doctor" (1967). Progress in physical ANTHROPOLOGY has encouraged a sophistication of fictional images of prehistoric life, reflected in such works as Cook (1981) by Tom Case and NO ENEMY BUT TIME (1982) by Michael BISHOP. The most remarkable modern manifestation of prehistoric fantasy is, however, the series of bestselling novels by Jean AUEL, collectively entitled Earth's Children, which begins with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980). Auel ingeniously combines a realism based in modern scientific understanding with robust literary romanticism. Also worthy of special note is a series of surreal prehistoric fantasies included in Italo CALVINO's COSMICOMICS (coll 1965; trans 1968) and t zero (coll 1967; trans 1969; vt Time and the Hunter). Significant scientific speculations on the topic are contained in two novels by the palaeontologist Bjorn KURTEN, Dance of the Tiger (1978; trans 1980) and Singletusk (1984; trans 1986).There have, of course, been several unorthodox accounts of the origin of Man, including various hypothetical extraterrestrial origins. Some, like that propounded by Erich VON DANIKEN, have been presented as fact. Such notions recur throughout the HISTORY OF SF, usually developed as silly plot gimmicks ( ADAM AND EVE). Among the more interesting examples are Eric Frank RUSSELL's Dreadful Sanctuary (1948; 1951; rev 1963), which plays with the Fortean hypothesis ( Charles FORT) that Earth is an asylum for the lunatics of other worlds, and James BLISH's "The Writing of the Rat" (1956), one of many stories which makes us the descendants of a "lost colony" within a galactic civilization. [BS]See also: MYTHOLOGY. ORKOW, BEN (HARRISON) (1896-1988) Russian-born US writer, mostly of plays and film scripts. In his sf novel When Time Stood Still (1962) a couple travel via SUSPENDED ANIMATION to AD2007, where her fatal disease may be curable. [JC] ORLACS HANDE (vt The Hands of Orlac) Film (1924). Pan Film. Dir Robert Wiene, starring Conrad Veidt, Fritz Kortner, Carmen Cartellieri, Alexandra Sorina. Screenplay Louis Nerz, based on Les mains d'Orlac (1920) by Maurice RENARD. 92 mins, cut to 70 mins. B/w.In this Austrian film from the director of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919), a pianist whose injured hands have been replaced with those of an executed murderer inherits also the murderer's homicidal tendencies, and must struggle against the domination of the dead man. The central idea is scientifically absurd, but it has an emotional logic and has attracted several film-makers. The best version is the US remake Mad Love (1935; vt The Hands of Orlac), which deviates somewhat from Renard's silly novel, shifting the emphasis from pianist to surgeon. It was dir Karl Freund (best known as a brilliant cameraman) from a script by Guy ENDORE, P.J. Wolfson and John L. Balderston, and starred Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, 70 mins, b/w. Lorre - in one of his few truly great performances and one of his first after arriving in the USA - plays the demented surgeon who grafts the murderer's hands onto a pianist whose wife he loves, and then attempts to drive him insane by masquerading as the executed murderer back from the dead. This stylish, Grand Guignol melodrama still seems stunning half a century later.Two later remakes were produced - one using the original title The Hands of Orlac (1960; vt Les mains d'Orlac; vt Hands of a Strangler) and the other called Hands of a Stranger (1963). The former was a UK-French coproduction made in two versions, the UK version dir Edmond T. Greville, the French dir Jacques Lemare, both versions starring Mel Ferrer, Lucille Saint Simon, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasence, Dany Carrel, Felix Aylmer, Basil Sydney and Donald Wolfit, with screenplay by John Baines and Grenville, 105 mins cut to 95 mins, b/w. The latter film was US, written and dir Newton Arnold, starring Paul Lukather, Joan Harvey, 86 mins cut to 73 mins, b/w. Both versions, particularly the latter, are distinctly inferior to Mad Love. [JB/PN] ORU KAIJU DAISHINGEKI GOJIRA. ORWELL, GEORGE Pseudonym of UK writer Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), much of whose best work was contained in his impassioned journalism and essays, assembled in the 4 vols of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (all coll 1968). His fiction and extended social criticism, as in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), also demonstrates his good sense and the intense clarity of his mind. His books of sf interest are two. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945 chap) is a fable satirical of the form communism took once it had established itself in the Soviet Union, and consequently enraged many of those who responded sensitively to criticisms of what they continued to perceive as a valid experiment in socialism. Despite its fable form, however, Animal Farm is an intensely practical book, mocking not the ideals of socialism or communism (many of which GO shared) but their corrupt embodiment in an actual state. The attack is direct, and the USSR is the target. A great revolution takes place on the Farm, but is soon subverted by the Pigs, whose leader, Napoleon, seizes power and reduces the Revolution's original 7 Commandments (the last being "All animals are equal") down to one, which is written in capitals on the communal wall: All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others. The attack on Stalin is devastating. A cartoon feature film animated by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, Animal Farm, was released in 1955.GO's most famous book remains NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), which was published shortly before his death of tuberculosis and which again caused some of his colleagues on the Left to accuse him (mistakenly) of betrayal. It was filmed in 1955 as 1984 and in 1984 as NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. With Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), it is the century's most famous English-language DYSTOPIA. It is a book of hectic, devilish, claustrophobic intensity, so nightmarish in the telling that some critics have faulted it (imperceptively) for subjective imbalance. In 1984, the world is divided into three vast enclaves: Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is devastatingly shabby - never having been decently rebuilt after an atomic war fought in the 1950s - and without hope. It is hard to resist a sense that GO was painting, with an unusual savagery of verisimilitude, the UK in which he lived - 1984 being simply a partial inversion of 1948 - but his presentation of the totalitarian regime ruling Airstrip One could be thought to apply to the contemporary Labour government of the UK only by those whose POLITICS were radically to the right of GO's own. The rulers of Airstrip One (symbolized by images of Big Brother) use their ability to inflict pain to drive the fact of their power into the masses, whose lives are mercilessly regimented by the Thought Police and who live in squalid barracks monitored by two-way tvs, their thoughts controlled by the Newspeak to which GO devoted a scathing appendix: "It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought . . . should be literally unthinkable." The scarifying story of Winston Smith's attempt to liberate himself, and of his eventual surrender of all his human dignity under torture, makes up the actual plot of the book. As an indictment of the deep tendency of modern, technologically sophisticated governments to manage reality, and as a further devastating assault upon the actual situation in the USSR of 1948, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was unmatched. Its pessimism was both distressing and salutary. Its understanding of the nightmare of power - when wielded by representatives of a species which had evolved beyond the constraints of mercy - was definitive. "Do not forget this," his chief torturer tells Winston at the finish, after glorying in the end of all natural human affinities and goals: "Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler . . . If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever." [JC]About the author: There is much Orwell criticism in print. Irving Howe's Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1963) is valuable, as are George Woodcock's The Crystal Spirit (1967) and George Orwell: A Reassessment (anth 1988) ed Peter Buitenhuis and Ira B. Nadel.See also: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; HISTORY OF SF; LINGUISTICS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MUSIC; POLAND; PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY; THEATRE. `================================================ OSBORNE, DAVID or GEORGE Robert SILVERBERG. O'SHEA, SEAN Robert S. TRALINS. OSHIKAWA, SHUNRO [r] JAPAN. OSMOND, ANDREW [r] Douglas HURD. OTHER EDENS UK original anthology series, consisting of Other Edens (anth 1987), #II (anth 1988) and #III (anth 1989), ed Christopher EVANS and Robert HOLDSTOCK. This was a curious series. The (ironic?) title is taken from the description of England in Shakespeare's Richard II, though the editors mistakenly say it was Richard III; in fact, however, they rather let down their own ambition of giving a boost to UK short fiction by including stories by US writers like Kim Stanley ROBINSON and Scott BRADFIELD, which led some readers to the unfortunate conclusion that not enough local material existed. Though good stories were published (many of the better ones inclining to FABULATION or fantasy rather than sf) the overall tone was bleak and introspective, sometimes to the point of self-parody; thus the series could be read as supporting the long-held US stereotype of UK sf, a stereotype that was contemporaneously being destroyed by the magazine INTERZONE. The series did include good work from the new generation of UK writers, including Gill ALDERMAN, Stephen BAXTER, Keith BROOKE and Ian MCDONALD. [PN] OTHER DIMENSIONS PARALLEL WORLDS. OTHER WORLDS US DIGEST-size magazine, in PULP-MAGAZINE format from Nov 1955. 47 issues, only 45 featuring fiction (not counting those titled either SCIENCE STORIES or UNIVERSE SCIENCE FICTION), Nov 1949-July 1953 (31 issues) and May 1955-Sep 1957 (16 issues). Published by Clark Publishing Co., Nov 1949-July 1953, and Palmer Publications Inc., May 1955-Nov 1957; ed Raymond A. PALMER. Though for some periods monthly, OW was usually a slightly irregular bimonthly.OW was launched by Palmer while he was still editor of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC ADVENTURES; for this reason editorship of the first issue was credited to Robert N. Webster (a Palmer pseudonym). OW was editorially very similar to the previous Palmer magazines, particularly in featuring the supposedly nonfictional stories of Richard S. SHAVER. Eric Frank RUSSELL was a regular contributor, and the magazine serialized L. Sprague DE CAMP's nonfiction Lost Continents (1952-3; 1954). OW was suspended after #31, July 1953.Palmer was notorious for his many title changes, and it is possible to regard his short-lived Science Stories (Oct 1953-Apr 1954) as a continuation of OW, the title change allowing him to duck some inconvenient printing bills, but Science Stories's numeration began again from #1. And, to confuse the story further, also in 1953 Palmer anonymously founded a new magazine, Universe Science Fiction, whose first 2 issues, June and Sep 1953, he ed under the pseudonym George Bell; with #3, Dec 1953, Palmer became officially its editor and publisher. After 10 issues (the last was Mar 1955) the title of Universe Science Fiction was changed to Other Worlds, and at this point the magazine's numeration followed both magazines (the first new OW, for example, being #11 [32] May 1955, it being the 11th Universe and the 32nd Other Worlds). 12 more issues followed, until in June 1957 the title was changed again, to Flying Saucers from Other Worlds, reflecting Palmer's increasing preoccupation with UFOS. Only 2 of the first 4 retitled issues (3 of which were unnumbered) featured sf stories, these being #2 and #4 (July and Sep 1957). After this, though it carried on for some years, the magazine became solely UFO-oriented. [MJE/FHP/PN] OTOMO, KATSUHIRO (1954- ) Japanese comic-book illustrator and film animator, one of the most popular in the new generation of "manga" (Japanese COMICS) artists. His debut, not sf, was in 1973 with "Jusei" ["Gun Report"], based on the novella "Mateo Falcone" (1833) by Prosper Merimee (1803-1870). Since then he has pleasantly shocked the comics world with his excellent artwork, his surreal way of telling a story and the dynamic movement of his scene-setting. His breakthrough from cult status to national fame came with the GRAPHIC NOVEL Dohmu ["A Dream of Childhood"] (1981; 1983; English trans projected 1992), which won the Nippon SF Taisho and a Sei'un Award ( JAPAN). This describes a conflict between the PSI POWERS of a murderous old man and of a group of children. KO's international status largely rests on the still-continuing Akira story, a graphic epic (over 1500pp) rather than a graphic novel. This began its first serialization in 1982-6, and resumed in 1988, in which year an English-language version commenced publication from Epic Comics. It has also been published in book form - several volumes - in both Japan and the USA. During the hiatus KO wrote, designed and directed the feature film version, AKIRA (1987), a tour de force of animation which, like the comic, alarmingly blends elements of "splatter" ( SPLATTER MOVIES) with images of post- HOLOCAUST evolutionary transcendence in a somewhat CYBERPUNK manner. KO's other main works include "Kibun Wa Moh Senso" ["Almost Enjoying the War"] (1979), "Highway Star" (1979) and "Rohjin Z" ["Old Man Z"] (1991). [TSh/PN] OTTUM, BOB Working name of US writer Robert K. Ottum Jr (?1925-1986), in whose surprisingly funny sf novel, All Right, Everybody Off the Planet (1972), inefficient ALIENS send a spy among us in human form; the humour derives from their ignorance of human relationships and from their attempts to stage-manage an impressive First Contact. A similar notion - with the sexes reversed - was much later used, leadenly, for the film MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (1988). [JC] OULD, CHRIS (?1959- ) UK writer whose sf novel, Road Lines (1985), was a NEAR-FUTURE thriller set in an apocalyptic landscape reminiscent, to some, of the MAD MAX films. [JC] OULIPO A term standing for L'Ouvroir de Litterature Potentialle, which might be crudely translated as "workshop of possible fictions". Oulipo is an extremely selfconscious international literary movement founded in 1960 by the French authors Raymond Queneau ( FRANCE) and Francois Le Lionnais; its official membership was originally limited to 10 but eventually expanded to the present 25. Over the years Oulipo's members and proponents have included many internationally known fabulists and magic realists such as Harry Mathews (1930- ), Georges Perec (1936-1982) and Italo CALVINO.Oulipo's tenets are radically high-Modernist. Inspired by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussurre (1857-1913), its members consider "literature" a game of language rather than a means of representing the world, a perspective foreign to most but not all sf writers. By designing artificial "constraints" and "structures", Oulipoeans try to make prose-writing difficult in the same way that metrical schemes make sonnets and sestinas difficult. But, in order to manufacture complicated products, it is necessary first to manufacture complicated machines. It is the friction generated by the author's imagination working against such formal constraints, Oulipo contends, that produces great art.Members of the group have tended to be mathematicians as well as writers. While many of their formal structures are extremely complicated, it is often their simplest formulae that produce the most spectacular results. Perhaps consciously following the example of Ernest Vincent Wright, whose novel Gadsby (1939) has no letter "e", Georges Perec (1936-1982) wrote the novel La Disparition ["The Disappearance"] (1969) without once using that letter. (When a work is produced by deleting a letter or set of letters, the resulting narrative is referred to as a "lipogram"; The Wonderful O [1957] by James Thurber [1894-1961] is about a lipogram world.) Italo Calvino generated the plot for his Il Castello dei Destini incrociati (coll of linked stories 1973; trans as The Castle of Crossed Destinies 1977 US) by randomly turning over the cards of a Tarot deck. Similar procedures were used by various contributors to Rachel POLLACK's Tarot Tales (anth 1989 UK).Thomas M. DISCH's novel 334 (fixup 1972 UK) is probably the most successful Oulipo-related experiment in the sf field. The title (which should be pronounced "three three four") does not refer primarily to a place or a time but rather describes the three-dimensional narrative diagram according to which the book is constructed. John T. SLADEK is another sf author who often builds his novels and stories according to arbitrary designs or games; in Tik-Tok (1983), for example, each of the 26 chapters begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. Other sf or sf-related authors who exhibit a similar "gamesmanship" in their work - whether having heard of Oulipo or not - include Don DELILLO, Vladimir NABOKOV, Rudy RUCKER and Pamela ZOLINE. [SB]See also: FABULATION; MAGIC REALISM; POSTMODERNISM IN SF; PSEUDO-SCIENCE. OUTER LIMITS, THE US tv series (1963-5). A Daystar/Villa di Stefano Production for United Artists, ABC TV. Created Leslie Stevens, also executive prod. Prod Joseph Stefano (season 1), Ben Brady (season 2). Writers included Stefano (many episodes), Stevens, David DUNCAN, Robert Towne, Harlan ELLISON, Meyer DOLINSKY, John MANTLEY, Jerry SOHL, Otto O. Binder ( Hyperlink to: Eando BINDER), Clifford D. SIMAK and Ib Melchior. Dirs included Byron HASKIN, Leonard Horn, Gerd Oswald, Charles Haas. 2 seasons, 49 50min episodes. B/w.TOL, which featured a new sf story each week, is often regarded as the classic sf-anthology series. Though leaning towards the HORROR or MONSTER-MOVIE end of the sf spectrum, the series was often innovative in both style and subject matter, and many of its writers either were sf professionals or knew the genre well. The pilot episode, "The Galaxy Being", written and dir Stevens, concerned an ALIEN made of pure energy who is accidentally absorbed into a 3D radio transceiver on Earth. Harlan Ellison contributed 2 episodes: "Soldier" (1964), about an ultraconditioned soldier from the future who is projected back in time and finds himself in a typical 1960s US household - a precursor of The TERMINATOR (1984) - and "Demon with a Glass Hand" (1964), perhaps the finest episode, about an ANDROID, pursued by aliens, who has the entire human race coded in his internal circuitry. Actors who appeared in the series - many of them then unknown - included Leonard Nimoy, Robert Culp, William SHATNER, Bruce Dern, Donald Pleasence, Martin Landau and David McCallum. The bizarre make-up that was such a feature of the series was the work of Fred Phillips, John Chambers and, primarily, Wah Chang.The talented cinematographer Conrad Hall worked on the 1st season, and the series was visually striking. Only stupid programming (it was shifted to a time-slot opposite the hugely popular Jackie Gleason Show) led to the series' cancellation halfway through the 2nd season. TOL was, on the whole, more imaginative and intelligent than its more famous competitor on CBS, Rod SERLING's The TWILIGHT ZONE. The Outer Limits: The Official Companion (1986) by David J. Schow and Jeffrey Frentzen is about the series. [JB/PN] OUTER PLANETS Relatively little attention has been paid in sf to the planets beyond Jupiter. Of them only Saturn was known to the ancients - Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930 - and it is therefore the only outer planet featured in Athanasius KIRCHER's and Emanuel SWEDENBORG's interplanetary tours. Uranus, however, is included in the anonymous Journeys into the Moon, Several Planets and the Sun: History of a Female Somnambulist (1837). The only object beyond Jupiter that has made significant appeal to speculative writers as a possible abode for life is Saturn's major moon Titan, though the fascinating rings have provoked a good deal of interest from interplanetary passers-by. Pluto has come in for a certain amount of special attention as the Ultima Thule of the Solar System, although as much - if not more - interest has been shown in the possibility of there being a 10th planet even further out.Saturn was visited, en route to Earth, by VOLTAIRE's tourist from Sirius in Micromegas (1750; 1952), and a Saturnian accompanied him on his sightseeing trip. It was one of the major worlds featured in J.B. Fayette's anonymously published The Experiences of Eon and Eona (1886); and in John Jacob ASTOR's A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) it is the home of the spirits, who confirm the truth of the theological beliefs of travellers from a future Earth. Roy ROCKWOOD's series of juvenile interplanetary novels extended thus far in By Spaceship to Saturn (1935), but relatively few PULP-MAGAZINE writers followed suit. Arthur K. BARNES's Interplanetary Hunter (1937-46; fixup 1956) ventured beyond Jupiter on two occasions, but Stanley G. WEINBAUM was the only early pulp writer of any real significance to explore the outer planets, in "Flight on Titan" (1935), "The Planet of Doubt" (1935) - one of the rare stories set on Uranus - and "The Red Peri" (1935), a SPACE OPERA set partly on Pluto. Other pulp stories set in the outer reaches include J.M. WALSH's "The Vanguard to Neptune" (1932), Wallace WEST's "En Route to Pluto" (1936), Raymond Z. GALLUN's "Raiders of Saturn's Rings" (1941) and Murray LEINSTER's "Pipeline to Pluto" (1945). One of Stanton A. COBLENTZ's SATIRES, Into Plutonian Depths (1931; 1950), delved there, and Clifford D. SIMAK's Cosmic Engineers (1939; rev 1950) begins near Pluto. By far and away the most significant role allotted to an outer planet in the speculative fiction of the pre-WWII period was, however, that given to Neptune by Olaf STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930) and Last Men in London (1932): in the very FAR FUTURE, the ultimate members of the human race are forced to make a new home there following the expansion of the Sun.In the post-WWII period the outer planets occasionally featured in more serious speculative fictions. The rings of Saturn play a key part in Isaac ASIMOV's "The Martian Way" (1952), and Asimov returned to the same locale in his juvenile Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn (1958) as by Paul French. Another notable juvenile in which Saturn is an abode of life is Philip LATHAM's Missing Men of Saturn (1953). Elsewhere, Titan features much more prominently than its parent world. Alan E. NOURSE's Trouble on Titan (1954) is a juvenile novel about COLONIZATION of the satellite, the climactic scenes of Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959) take place there, and Titan is the location of huge ALIEN machines in Ben BOVA's As on a Darkling Plain (1972). A more fully described colony is featured in Arthur C. CLARKE's Imperial Earth (1976), and it is the home of the strange lifeform that provides the climax of Gregory BENFORD's and Gordon EKLUND's If the Stars are Gods (fixup 1977). An artificial world hidden among the satellites of Saturn is the main locale of John VARLEY's Gaean trilogy begun with Titan (1979).Pluto figures prominently in Algis BUDRYS's Man of Earth (1958), and is the destination of the characters in Wilson TUCKER's To the Tombaugh Station (1960). It is the setting of Kim Stanley ROBINSON's mysterious artefact in Icehenge (1984), and the starting-point of the interplanetary tour featured in the same author's The Memory of Whiteness (1985), which zooms past Uranus and Neptune at considerable narrative pace. Neptune's moon Triton is the setting of Margaret ST CLAIR's "The Pillows" (1950) and Samuel R. DELANY's "ambiguous heterotopia" in Triton (1976). The "outer satellites" conduct a war against the inner planets in Alfred BESTER's Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination US), but the reader never gets to visit them; a much more detailed conflict takes place in Cecelia HOLLAND's Floating Worlds (1976), in which the cities of the title float above Saturn and Uranus. Few of those space operas whose action is partly set in the more remote regions of the Solar System pause to take in much of the scenery, but notable recent exceptions include Colin GREENLAND's TAKE BACK PLENTY (1990) and Roger McBride ALLEN's The Ring of Charon (1990), both of which are partly set on Pluto's large moon Charon.It has long been held in some quarters that a 10th planet is necessary to account for the orbital perturbations of Uranus, even after Neptune and Pluto are taken into account, and sf writers have occasionally dealt with the possibility. The protagonists of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's The Planeteers (1936-8; coll of linked stories 1966) ultimately make their way there, and it is the setting for Henry KUTTNER's "We Guard the Black Planet" (1942). In Philip K. DICK's SOLAR LOTTERY (1955; vt World of Chance) members of an esoteric cult flee Earth in the hope of finding such a world. Edmund COOPER's The Tenth Planet (1973) plants an advanced civilization there. Contrastingly, in Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE it is a much more remote GAS GIANT, whose gravity perturbs the orbit of a comet, deflecting it towards Earth. Perhaps more intriguing than the notion of a 10th planet is speculation about the Solar System's diffuse cometary "halo". An extravagant sf version of this is developed in The Reefs of Space (1964) by Frederik POHL and Jack WILLIAMSON, which features a particularly imaginative reef life-system. Clarke's Imperial Earth makes much of the possibility of life existing beyond Pluto, and Williamson made further use of the locale in Lifeburst (1984).More recently, there has been discussion among astronomers of the possibility that the cause of the orbital perturbations among the outer planets might instead be another star a couple of light years away; i.e., that the Sun might be not a singleton star but one element of a widely spaced binary (most stars are multiple rather than solitary), the other component being a dwarf star, a NEUTRON STAR or even a BLACK HOLE. Even a dwarf star would, at such a distance, be insignificant enough in our skies to make identification difficult. Or the cause might be a yet undetected nearby star heading in our direction, as suggested in Asimov's Nemesis (1989). [BS] OUTLAND Film (1981). Ladd Co. Dir Peter Hyams, starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen. Screenplay Hyams. 109 mins. Colour.A mining base on Io, third moon of Jupiter. The new marshal (Connery) discovers that the mine manager (Boyle), in a bid to increase production, is introducing powerful amphetamines which ultimately render the workers psychotic and suicidal. The manager hires assassins to kill the nosy marshal. The critical cliche that O is High Noon (1952) in space is absolutely true. This routine anti-capitalist adventure is lifted out of the ordinary by its richly textured setting (the art director was Malcolm Middleton)-dirty, crowded, and wholly convincing as an unromanticized future industrial settlement. There are also good performances from Sternhagen as a cantankerous lady doctor and Connery as the tired, middle-aged failure making good. The novelization is Outland * (1981) by Alan Dean FOSTER. [PN] OUTLANDS UK DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue, Winter 1946. Published by Outlands Publications, Liverpool; ed Leslie J. Johnson. An abortive SEMIPROZINE of undistinguished fiction, subtitled "A Magazine for Adventurous Minds", O included stories by John Russell FEARN and Sydney J. BOUNDS (his first published story). [MJE/FHP] OUT OF THE DARKNESS Roger CORMAN. OUT OF THE UNKNOWN UK tv series (1965-71). BBC TV. Prod Irene Shubik (seasons 1 and 2), Alan Bromly (seasons 3 and 4). Script editor Irene Shubik (seasons 1 and 2), Roger Parkes (seasons 3 and 4). Writers included Terry NATION, J.B. PRIESTLEY, Troy Kennedy Martin, Clive Exton, Julian Bond, Nigel KNEALE. Dirs included Michael Ferguson, Peter Sasdy, Philip Saville, Philip Dudley, Eric Hills. 4 seasons, 49 episodes, each 50 mins in 1st season, 60 mins thereafter. Seasons 1-2 b/w, thereafter colour.This sf-anthology series, originated by Irene Shubik - previously story editor on OUT OF THIS WORLD (1962) - dramatized the work of many well known sf writers. Adapted stories and novels included Immortality, Inc. (1958) by Robert SHECKLEY, Liar! (1941; rev 1977 chap) by Isaac ASIMOV, "The Last Lonely Man" (1964) by John BRUNNER, "Beachhead" (1951) by Clifford D. SIMAK, "Random Quest" (1961) by John WYNDHAM, "The Little Black Bag" (1950) by C. M. KORNBLUTH, "Thirteen for Centaurus" (1962) by J.G. BALLARD, The Naked Sun (1957) by Asimov, "The Midas Plague" (1954) by Frederik POHL, "Andover and the Android" (1963) by Kate WILHELM, "The Yellow Pill" (1958) by Rog PHILLIPS, Level 7 (1959) by Mordecai ROSHWALD and "The Machine Stops" (1909) by E.M. FORSTER. Despite budget limitations, the standard of production was often very high, and good actors were used; one episode was designed by Ridley SCOTT. The quality of the scripts varied, some of the writers assigned being unfamiliar with sf. After 3 seasons the BBC decided that the series lacked mass popularity, and for the 4th switched it from sf to supernatural stories, all but one being original teleplays. [PN/JB] OUT OF THIS WORLD 1. US tv series (1952). ABC TV. Prod Milton Kaye. Narrated Jackson Beck. 1 season, 25min episodes. B/w.OOTW hovered between sf and lectures on science. In episode 3, for example, we saw a young couple in 1993 going to the Moon for a vacation and then telephoning their relations on Earth. Between these dramatized segments the narrator discussed with a scientist, Robert R. Cole, the actual possibilities of space travel and conditions on the Moon.2. UK tv series (1962). ABC TV. Prod Leonard White. Story editor Irene Shubik. 13 50min episodes. B/w.This short-lived but relatively ambitious sf-anthology series - the first such in the UK - was hosted by Boris Karloff (1887-1969). Stories adapted for the series included Little Lost Robot (1947; rev 1977 chap) by Isaac ASIMOV, "The Cold Equations" (1954) by Tom GODWIN, "Impostor" (1953) by Philip K. DICK and "Pictures Don't Lie" (1951) by Katherine MACLEAN. Of the two original teleplays used, one was "Botany Bay" by Terry NATION, later to become a driving force behind DR WHO. OOTW's success inspired Shubik to make the similar (but better) OUT OF THE UNKNOWN series 3 years later, this time for the BBC rather than commercial tv. [JB] OUT OF THIS WORLD ADVENTURES US PULP MAGAZINE. 2 issues, July 1950 and Dec 1950, published by Avon Periodicals; ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM. #1 included an impressive line-up of authors: A. Bertram CHANDLER, Ray CUMMINGS, Lester DEL REY, Kris NEVILLE, Mack REYNOLDS, William TENN and A.E. VAN VOGT. The stories, however, were not the authors' best, and Chandler was the only writer of equivalent stature in #2. An unusual feature was a 32pp COMICS section in colour (#2 of the Canadian edition included a different comics section from that in the US edition). The comics feature proved not to be the expected selling point, and the magazine flopped. [MJE]OOTWA should not be confused with the UK weird-fiction DIGEST magazine Out of this World (2 issues 1954-5), published by John Spencer & Co. ( BADGER BOOKS). [MJE] OUTSIDER FINLAND. OVERLAND MONTHLY, THE US magazine founded by Bret Harte (1836-1902), published in San Francisco by A. Roman & Co., monthly, July 1868-Dec 1875, then again Jan 1883-July 1935. Under the editorship of Millicent W. Shinn a special "Twentieth Century" issue - June 1890 - contained articles and essays all directly related to Edward BELLAMY's then much discussed work Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888). In addition, its 6 fiction contributions were all sf, including an early translation of Kurd LASSWITZ (Chapter 1 of "Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins" [1871], under the title "Pictures out of the Future"). This is the earliest known case of a general magazine devoting an issue exclusively to sf. OM is known for its publication of poetry and fiction by Clark Ashton SMITH in the 1910s and 1920s, and for several "Yellow Peril" stories by little-known authors. [JE/PN] OVERPOPULATION In 1798 the UK economist Thomas R. Malthus (1766-1834) published his Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, arguing that a UTOPIAN situation of peace and plenty would be impossible to achieve because the tendency of populations, in the absence of the checks of war, famine and plague, to increase exponentially would result in society's continually outgrowing its resources. In the second edition (1803), replying to criticism, he introduced another hypothetical check: voluntary restriction of population by the exercise of "moral restraint". But Malthus had little faith in the effectiveness of moral restraint, and most modern sf writers agree with him.Although the amended Malthusian argument was (and is) logically unassailable, it was ignored or even attacked by most speculative writers even after it had become known that world population was indeed increasing exponentially. Richard Whiteing (1840-1928) brought the entire population of the world to the Isle of Wight to prove that anxiety about overpopulation was, as his title stated, All Moonshine (1907). It was not until the 1960s that awareness of the population problem resurfaced, probably as a consequence of an already-widespread DYSTOPIAN pessimism ( OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM), which it then helped to maintain and amplify. The major nonfiction books involved in the popularization of the issue were The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich and The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972) by D.H. Meadows et al.Although MARVEL SCIENCE STORIES published in its Nov 1951 issue a "symposium" on the subject of whether the world's population should be strategically limited, the question was at that time unexplored in sf. C.M. KORNBLUTH's "The Marching Morons" (1951), depicting a future in which the intelligentsia have prudently exercised birth control while the lumpenproletariat have multiplied unrestrainedly, is a black comedy on the theme of eugenics rather than of overpopulation. In Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's equally black comedy, "The Big Trip up Yonder" (1954), overpopulation is the result of technologies of longevity rather than ordinary increase. Overpopulated milieux became gradually more evident in 1950s sf. Isaac ASIMOV, one of the first sf writers to become anxious about the matter, displayed one such in The Caves of Steel (1954). Frederik POHL produced the first of many ironic fantasies of corrective mass homicide in "The Census Takers" (1956); Robert SILVERBERG's Master of Life and Death (1957) takes the notion of institutionalized population control more seriously; and Kornbluth's "Shark Ship" (1958) is a melodramatic horror story of overpopulation and resultant POLLUTION. An effectively understated treatment of the theme is J.G. BALLARD's "Billenium" (1961), which presents a simple picture of the slow shrinkage of personal space. A curiously ambivalent approach is adopted in Lester DEL REY's The Eleventh Commandment (1962), which begins as a polemic against overfertility but concludes with a SOCIAL-DARWINIST volte-face. The most powerful attempt to confront the issue squarely and in some detail was Harry HARRISON's MAKE ROOM! MAKE ROOM! (1966), a novel whose thrust was entirely lost when it was filmed as SOYLENT GREEN (1973). A major novel from India, The Wind Obeys Lama Toru (1967) by LEE TUNG, quickly followed.There are three aspects to the population problem: the exhaustion of resources; the destruction of the environment by pollution; and the social problems of living in crowded conditions. The first two aspects form the basis of most extrapolations of the problem, including A Torrent of Faces (1968) by James BLISH and Norman L. KNIGHT and The Sheep Look Up (1972) by John BRUNNER, and such black comedies as "The People Trap" (1968) by Robert SHECKLEY and "The Big Space Fuck" (1972) by Vonnegut. The third aspect comes into sharper focus in STAND ON ZANZIBAR (1968) by Brunner, The World Inside (1972) by Silverberg, 334 (1972) by Thomas M. DISCH and My Petition for More Space (1974) by John HERSEY. Because sf writers had not considered the problem until it was imminent, the quest for hypothetical solutions was difficult, and many stories hysterically allege that it is already too late to act effectively. Such traditional sf myths as the escape into space lack plausibility in the context of a problem so immediate, as demonstrated by such stories as Blish's "We All Die Naked" (1969). Confidence in moral restraint, even aided by birth control (which Malthus forbore to propose), was so low that sf stories exploring possible solutions almost always concern themselves with the setting up of Draconian prohibitions or with various forms of overt and covert culling. Stories of grotesque mass homicide include, in addition to those cited above, D.G. COMPTON's The Quality of Mercy (1965), William F. NOLAN's and George Clayton JOHNSON's Logan's Run (1967), Leonard C. LEWIN's Triage (1972), Piers ANTHONY's Triple Detente (1974), Chelsea Quinn YARBRO's Time of the Fourth Horseman (1976) and Snoo WILSON's Spaceache (1984). Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House" (1968) mockingly envisages a future in which reproduction is discouraged by the use of bromides, but most speculations in this vein are more gruesomely inclined. Suggested solutions not involving mass murder are rare, and not usually to be taken seriously; a notable example is that featured in Philip Jose FARMER's Dayworld (1985) and its sequels, in which every person is conscious only one day a week, spending the remaining six in suspended animation, thus effectively packing seven people into one person's space. A rare application of Malthusian thinking to an ALIEN situation is employed in THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE (1974) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry E. POURNELLE, in which a species for whom birth control is impossible has negative checks built in at the biological level.Although the real-world situation grows worse each passing day, the fashionability of overpopulation stories in sf has waned dramatically since 1980, partly in accordance with a general tendency to skip over the most frightening problems of the NEAR FUTURE and partly because of the absorption of the population problem into a more general sense of impending ecocatastrophe ( ECOLOGY). Perhaps, though, the problem does not really deserve to be considered urgent. As Malthus pointed out, the situation is self-correcting; when there are more people than the world can accommodate, the surplus will inevitably die - one way, or another.An interesting but now quaintly dated anthology accurately reflecting the mood at the height of the panic is Voyages: Scenarios for a Ship Called Earth (anth 1971) ed Bob Sauer, published by BALLANTINE BOOKS for the Zero Population Growth movement. [BS]See also: POLITICS; PREDICTION; SOCIOLOGY. OVERTON, MAX [s] Don WILCOX. OWEN, DEAN Pseudonym - and eventually perhaps the legal name - of US writer Dudley Dean McGaughy (1913-1985), whose routine novelizations of horror and sf films are The Brides of Dracula * (1960), Konga * (1960), Reptilicus * (1961) and End of the World * (1962), based on PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! (1962), a film in turn based, without acknowledgement, on two short stories by Ward MOORE. Monarch Books's habit of publishing soft-porn adaptations of chaste movies led to at least one court case ( REPTILICUS). [JC/PN] OWINGS, MARK (1945- ) US bibliographer and SMALL-PRESS publisher; with Jack L. CHALKER, he was involved for a period with MIRAGE PRESS, which published his magnum opus, The Index to the Science-Fantasy Publishers (1966 chap; rev 1966; vastly exp, vt The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Bibliographic History 1991), all edns with Chalker (whom see for further details). Other books through Mirage included The Necronomicon: A Study (1967 chap), solo, and The Revised H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography (1973 chap) with Chalker. With Chalker and Ted Pauls, MO founded Croatan House, through which he published Robert A. Heinlein: A Bibliography (1973 chap) and James H. Schmitz: A Bibliography (1973 chap). Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins): A Bibliography (1970 chap), The Electric Bibliograph, Part I: Clifford D. Simak (1971 chap), Poul Anderson: Bibliography (1973 chap) and A Catalog of Lovecraftiana: The Grill/Binkin Collection (1975 chap) with Irving Binkin were all published elsewhere. [JC] |