SF&F encyclopedia (L-L)LACH-SZYRMA, W(LADISLAW) S(OMERVILLE) (1841-1915) UK Anglican clergyman and author who began writing his series of interplanetary romances featuring the travels around the Solar System of the winged Venusian Aleriel in a magazine story in 1865; this was incorporated into A Voice from Another World (1874 as by WSL-S; exp vt Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds as by the Rev. W.S. Lach-Szyrma 1883). Aleriel's further travels were chronicled in his anonymous Letters from the Planets series in Cassell's Family Magazine, 9 stories (1887-93) which were reprinted in Worlds Apart (anth 1972) ed George LOCKE. Under Other Conditions (1892), which belongs to the series, tells of another Venusian's adventures on Earth. These rather preachy stories concentrate on sightseeing and ethics, but fair-mindedly stress that other planetary conditions may lead to other customs. Lach-Szyrma could be considered a minor forerunner to C.S. LEWIS. [PN]See also: MARS; MOON; VENUS. LACKEY, MERCEDES [r] C.J. CHERRYH; Anne MCCAFFREY; Andre NORTON. LADY AND THE MONSTER, THE Film (1944). Republic. Prod and dir George Sherman, starring Vera Ralston, Richard Arlen, Erich von Stroheim, Sidney Blackmer. Screenplay Dane Lussier, Frederick Kohner, based on Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt SIODMAK. 86 min. B/w.This is the first of the 3 film versions of Siodmak's novel; the others are DONOVAN'S BRAIN (1953) and VENGEANCE (1963; vt The Brain). Financial wizard W.H. Donovan is killed when his plane crashes in the desert. An obsessive SCIENTIST (von Stroheim), whose laboratory is nearby, removes the undamaged brain and keeps it alive in a glass tank, but it gradually takes over the minds of those around it, forcing them to commit a series of evil deeds. The photography is atmospheric, but the film overall is routine GOTHIC melodrama. [JB/PN]See also: CINEMA. LAFARGUE, PHILIP Pseudonym of UK writer and physician Joseph Henry Philpot (1850-1939), whose The Forsaken Way: A Romance (1900) depicts the UK at the close of the 20th century as a romantic ruin. After falling in love, the protagonist leaves his monastery and starts a new life. [JC] LAFAYETTE, RENE [s] L. Ron HUBBARD. LAFFERTY, R(APHAEL) A(LOYSIUS) (1914- ) US writer who worked in the electrical business until retiring in 1971; he came to writing only in his 40s, publishing his first sf, "Day of the Glacier", with The Original Science Fiction Stories in 1960. Over the next 25 years (he reportedly retired from writing at the age of about 70) he produced many stories - about 200 have been published - and a number of novels. The extremely active SMALL-PRESS interest in his work gave birth to a large number of titles in the late 1980s, most of them short collections, but much RAL material remains apparently in manuscript, including several of the titles mentioned in The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists (1983) by Malcolm EDWARDS and Maxim JAKUBOWSKI.There are reasons for this apparent neglect of a writer whose originality and whose value to the sf/fantasy world have never been questioned. From the first, RAL demonstrated only the slenderest interest in making his stories conform to any critical or marketing definition of either sf or fantasy. He has fairly been described as a writer of tall tales, as a cartoonist, as an author whose tone is fundamentally oral; his conservative Catholicism has been seen as permeating every word he writes (or has been ignored); he has been seen as a ransacker of old MYTHOLOGIES, and as a flippant generator of new ones; he delights in a vision of the world as being irradiated by conspiracies both godly and devilish, but at times pays scant attention to the niceties of plotting; he has been understood by some as essentially light-hearted and by others as a solitary, stringent moralist; he is technically inventive, but lunges constantly into a slapdash sublime; his skill in the deploying of various rhetorical narrative voices is manifest, but these voices are sometimes choked in baroque flamboyance. He was awarded a 1973 HUGO for Best Short Story for "Eurema's Dam" (1972); and in the 1960s and 1970s, partly through his (in retrospect tenuous) association with the NEW WAVE, he was seen as a figure of looming eccentricity and central import. For his career's sake, it was certainly unfortunate that his response to renown seems to have been an intensification of the oddness of his product; final judgement on the effect of this failure to observe normal canons of writing still awaits a coherent presentation of his work as a whole. However, though many stories remain uncollected, RAL did assemble several volumes which grant some view of the entirety, including NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS (coll 1970), Strange Doings (coll 1972), Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? (coll 1974), Ringing Changes (coll 1984; 1st published in Dutch trans as Dagan van Gras, Dagan van Stro ["Days of Grass, Days of Straw"] 1979), Golden Gate and Other Stories (coll 1982), Through Elegant Eyes: Stories of Austro and the Men who Know Everything (coll 1983), and Lafferty in Orbit (coll 1991), which puts together all the work originally published in Damon KNIGHT's ORBIT series of original anthologies (1967-80). Many other stories have been printed as chapbooks (see listing below).RAL's first three novels, Past Master (1968), The Reefs of Earth (1968) and Space Chantey (1968 dos), all appeared within a few months of one another, causing some stir. Pre-publication praise for Past Master (accolades from New-Wave writers Samuel R. DELANY, Roger ZELAZNY and Harlan ELLISON) demonstrated the impact his work was beginning to have, and, though it can be said that the US New Wave amounted more to an iconoclastic tone of voice than a programme, its generally sardonic air proved bracing to such mature writers as RAL, whose entry at age 45 into the field seemed to betoken its growing maturity. Past Master places Sir Thomas More on the planet Astrobe, where he is tricked into becoming World President and suffers once again a martyr's death: the contrasts between UTOPIA and life are laid down without the normal derision. Space Chantey retells HOMER's Odyssey as SPACE OPERA, very rollickingly, and is the most representative of RAL's attempts to liberate sagas by transposing them into a rambunctious, myth-saturated, never-never-land future. In The Reefs of Earth (RAL's first-completed novel) a passel of ALIEN children bumptiously attempt to rid Earth of humans, and fail. More complexly, FOURTH MANSIONS (1969), possibly RAL's most sustained single novel, articulates with some clarity the basic underlying bent of his best work: a protagonist (or several) finds a pattern of flamboyant, arcane, dreamlike clues to a conspiracy (or conspiracies) between Good and Evil whose outcome will determine the moral nature of reality to come; and enters the fray joyously (though confusingly) upon the side of the angels. Though much of RAL's work shares characters, and plot segments shuttle back and forth from book to book, he has written only one explicit genre series, the Argos Mythos: Archipelago: The First Book of The Devil is Dead Trilogy (1979), The Devil is Dead (1971), Promontory Goats (1988 chap Canada), How Many Miles to Babylon? (1989 chap Canada),Episodes of the Argo (coll 1990 chap Canada), which contains part of the conclusion of the long-written third part of the series, the More than Melchisedech sequence, now finally published in full, in 3 vols, as Tales of Chicago (1992), Tales of Midnight (1992 chap Canada) and Argo (fixup 1992 Canada). The Argos Mythos treats a group of WWII buddies as reincarnations of Jason's Argonauts, and engages them in a long, myth-saturated battle against Evil. Later novels, like Arrive at Easterwine: The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine (1971), the life story of a COMPUTER which also features in some stories as well, begins to evince a tangledness that comes, at times, close to incoherence."The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny", the second novel-length tale assembled in Apocalypses (coll 1977), suggests that the comprehensive power of opera ( MUSIC) might, in an alternate world, stop war. Dotty (1990 chap Canada), though not directly part of the Argos Mythos and ostensibly not sf or fantasy at all, embraces the "mundane" world, sf, fantasy, Jason, the Argonauts and much else in 96 packed pages. Even now the full explication of the extremities of RAL's large universe remains impossible; for it seems there is more to come. [JC]Other works: The Fall of Rome (1971); the Coscuin Chronicles, historical novels transfigured into fable, of which have been published The Flame is Green (1971) and Half a Sky (1984); Okla Hannali (1972), historical; Not to Mention Camels: A Science Fiction Fantasy (1976); Funnyfingers & Cabrito (coll 1976 chap); Horns on their Heads (1976 chap); Aurelia (1982); Annals of Klepsis (1983); Snake in his Bosom and Other Stories (coll 1983 chap); Four Stories (coll 1983 chap); Heart of Stone, Dear and Other Stories (coll 1983 chap); Laughing Kelly and Other Verses (coll 1983 chap); The Man who Made Models and Other Stories (coll 1984 chap); Slippery and Other Stories (coll 1985 chap); the first two chapters of My Heart Leaps Up (1920-28) (1986 chap), followed by chapters 3 and 4 (1987 chap), 5 and 6 (1987 chap), 7 and 8 (1988 chap) and 9 and 10 (1990 chap), making up the first volume of the projected In a Green Tree sequence, the second volume of which, Grasshoppers & Wild Honey (1928-1942), was continued on the same basis, starting with chapters 1 and 2 (1992 chap); Serpent's Egg (1987 UK; 1 story added to the limited issue to make coll 1987); The Early Lafferty (coll 1988 chap Canada) and The Early Lafferty II (coll 1990 chap Canada); East of Laughter (1988 UK; with 1 story added to the limited issue to make coll); Strange Skies (coll 1988 chap Canada), verse; The Back Door of History (coll 1988 chap Canada); The Elliptical Grave (1989; with 1 story added to the limited issue to make coll 1989); Sindbad: The 13th Voyage (1989); Mischief Malicious (and Murder Most Strange) (coll 1991 chap Canada), which contains work from as early as 1961; Iron Tears (coll 1992).Nonfiction: It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (coll 1984 chap); True Believers (coll 1989 chap); Cranky Old Man from Tulsa: Interviews with R.A. Lafferty (coll 1990 chap Canada). About the author: An R.A. Lafferty Checklist (1991 chap) by Dan Knight.See also: CITIES; END OF THE WORLD; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HEROES; HUMOUR; INTELLIGENCE; LINGUISTICS; MESSIAHS; PERCEPTION; REINCARNATION. LAGRANGE POINT In 1772 the French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) calculated that in the orbit of Jupiter around the Sun there would be two stable positions, one 60deg ahead of the planet, the other 60deg behind, where a comparatively tiny mass would remain in stable orbit around the Sun rather than being swept up Jupiter's gravitational field. (More than a century later two groups of ASTEROIDS, the Trojans, were found at these positions in Jupiter's orbit.) This is a general principle, part of what is sometimes called the three-body problem, although usually more than 3 bodies must be considered; for example, if planning to site a SPACE HABITAT at one of the Lagrange Points (or Lagrangian Points) of the Earth-Moon system, one must take into account also the gravitational presence of the Sun (the mass of the habitat itself can be discounted as trivially small). There are 5 Lagrange Points in the Earth-Moon system; they are not absolutely fixed in relation to the Earth and Moon but, because of the Sun's influence, slowly circle "Lagrange Regions". They are numbered L1 to L5.The Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill (1927-1992), an important propagandist for space colonies, argued in The High Frontier (1977) that good sites for such colonies would be L4 and L5, 60deg ahead of and behind the Moon in its orbit. He particularly liked L5, and this region soon became something of an sf CLICHE as the site for fictional space cities consisting of clusters of habitats. [PN] LAIDLAW, MARC (1960- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Hiss of Dragon" with Gregory BENFORD for Omni in 1978. Though he published solo stories with some frequency in the 1980s, his best known short work is perhaps the group of mathematically oriented tales written with Rudy RUCKER, such as "Chaos Surfari" (1989). ML's first novel, Dad's Nuke (1985), is a SATIRE of suburban life and Christian fundamentalism set in a NEAR-FUTURE community effectively sealed off from the rest of the disintegrating USA; ritual technological fixes for anxiety include having a personal nuclear power plant and a baby adapted ( GENETIC ENGINEERING) to recycle the wastes into her lead-lined diapers. ML's second novel, the amusing Neon Lotus (1988), follows the consequences of the REINCARNATION of a Tibetan Buddhist sage as a young girl in a highly technologized USA. Kalifornia (1993) is a further satire, and The Orchid Eater (1994) is associational. [NT]See also: TECHNOLOGY; WEAPONS. LAING, ALEXANDER (KINNAN) (1903-1976) US writer, editor and academic, noted for his books on the sea, for editing The Haunted Omnibus (anth 1937; vt Great Ghost Stories of the World 1939), and for his murder novel, The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck, by a Medical Student (1934), which hinges on horrific changes to the human body. Two further books with fantastic elements are Dr Scarlett: A Narrative of his Mysterious Behavior in the East (1936) and its sequel, The Methods of Dr Scarlett (1937). In collaboration with Thomas PAINTER, AL wrote an sf thriller, The Motives of Nicholas Holtz, Being the Weird Tale of the Ironville Virus (1936; vt The Glass Centipede, Retold from the Original Sources 1936 UK). Persuasively authentic in its use of biological data, it is a well told story of the creation of artificial life in the form of a deadly virus, and of the dangers that beset the man who investigates the ensuing deaths. [PN]See also: MONSTERS. LAKE, DAVID J(OHN) (1929- ) Indian-born Australian writer (he emigrated in 1967), originally a UK citizen; his education (a Jesuit school in India, a BA in English at Cambridge, a diploma in linguistics and a PhD in English) is reflected in the texture of his sf work, as is his teaching in Vietnam, Thailand and India (1959-67). After publishing several works of criticism, including the strongly argued, somewhat controversial The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays (1975) and a volume of poetry, Hornpipes and Funerals (coll 1973), which deals with some of the themes of his fiction, he began publishing sf with the first of his Breakout Novels sequence, Walkers on the Sky (1976 US). It was followed by The Right Hand of Dextra (1977 US) and The Wildings of Westron (1977 US), both set on Dextra; by The Gods of Xuma, or Barsoom Revisited (1978 US) and Warlords of Xuma (1983 US), which constitute a riposte to the sexism and crudity of E.R. BURROUGHS's Barsoom novels; and by The Fourth Hemisphere (1980), set on yet another planet. All the books in the sequence share certain fundamental premises: in WWIV (AD2068) Earth destroys itself, and by AD2122 the colonies of the Moon are also in the throes of terminal conflict; but, before the final collapse, interstellar ships break out of the Solar System in search of suitable planets for COLONIZATION. The novels to date are set on various of these planets and share comparatively simple, action-packed surface narratives matched with considerable complexity of implication, some of it Jungian. Walkers on the Sky, set AD12117, entertainingly carries a young man across a terraformed world irradiated by planes of force whose operation explains the dreamlike behaviour indicated by the title. The Right Hand of Dextra, set earlier, in AD2687, intermingles biological, religious and colonization themes in the story of the reconciliation between incompatible forms of biological organization on a planet whose human colonists are religious fundamentalists insensitive to the vital questions surrounding Dextra's weird ECOLOGY.Of books lying outside this central sequence, the most interesting is perhaps The Man who Loved Morlocks (1981). Ostensibly a sequel to H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE (1895), it also works as a sustained and loving critique of that book, of its author and of the late-19th-century mind-sets which shaped both. Ring of Truth (1982; vt The Ring of Truth 1984 US) is a POCKET-UNIVERSE tale of surreal intensity whose climax - unusually for this sort of book - provides no soothing explanation for the shape of the world. The Changelings of Chaan (1985) and West of the Moon (1988) are juveniles. Despite an occasional truculent stiffness of diction, DJL is a writer of fully realized fictions whose work, almost always, flows with thought. [JC]See also: ALIENS; AUSTRALIA; COSMOLOGY; EVOLUTION; GRAVITY; SOCIOLOGY; TIME TRAVEL; TRANSPORTATION. LALLI, CELE G. [r] Cele GOLDSMITH. LA MASTER, SLATER (1890-? ) US writer whose Cupid Napoleon (1928 Argosy-All-Story as "Luckett of the Moon"; 1934) is a delusional interplanetary romance whose satirical effects are seriously jumbled. The Phantom in the Rainbow (1929) is marginal sf. [JE/JC] LAMB, WILLIAM Storm JAMESON. LAMBE, DEAN R. [r] Michael A. BANKS. LAMBERT, S.H. Neil BELL. LAMBOURNE, JOHN Form of his name used on books by UK writer John Battersby Crompton Lamburn (1893-? ), brother of Richmal Crompton (1890-1969), authoress of the Just William children's books. JL's The Kingdom that Was (1931) and its sequel The Second Leopard (1932) are mildly allegorical, subduedly humorous works describing how, 50,000 years ago, the apathetic rulers of the animal kingdom were led to abdicate in favour of mankind. JL also wrote The Unmeasured Place (1933), about a female vampire-cum-were-leopard. [JE] LAMPLUGH, LOIS (1921- ) UK editor and writer whose Mandog * (1972) novelizes Peter DICKINSON's script for a tv tale for children. [JC] LAMPTON, CHRIS Working name of US writer Christopher Lampton (1950- ), who began writing sf with The Seeker (1976 Canada) with David F. BISCHOFF. He continued with two further competent sf adventures, Cross of Empire (1976 Canada) and Gateway to Limbo (1979). [JC] LANCE, KATHRYN (1943- ) US writer. Much of her work has consisted of non-sf tales for children, often as by Lynn Beach (see listing below). Her sf has been restricted to the Pandora sequence - Pandora's Genes (1985) and Pandora's Children (1986) - set in a post- HOLOCAUST world where pluck and luck seem set to ensure a viable future. [JC]Other works, as Lynn Beach: contributions to the Find your Fate: G.I. Joe sequence, including G.I. Joe: Operation Jungle Doom * (1986), G.I. Joe: Operation Time Machine * (1987) and Invisibility Island * (1988); H.O.W.L. High (1991); the Phantom Valley sequence of fantasy adventures starring a warlock boy, comprising Phantom Valley #1: The Evil One (1991), #2: The Dark (1991) and #3: Scream of the Cat (1992); other titles, variously attached to juvenile fantasy series, include Secrets of the Lost Island * (1984 chap), The Attack of the Insecticons * (1985 chap), Conquest of the Time Master * (1985), The Haunted Castle of Ravencurse * (1985) and Invaders from Darkland * (1986). LANCOUR, GENE Working name of Gene Lancour Fisher (1947- ), US author of the SWORD-AND-SORCERY Dirshan series about Dirshan the God-Killer, a barbarian warrior: The Lerios Mecca (1973), The War Machines of Kalinth (1977), Sword for the Empire (1978) and The Maneaters of Cascalon (1979). GL's next book was sf: The Globes of Llarum (1980) puts a mercenary on the side of rebel independents against a giant corporation on a frontier planet; complications routinely ensue. [PN] LANDIS, ARTHUR H(AROLD) (1917-1986) US author and editor. While editing for Dealer's Voice, a motorcycle magazine, AHL convinced his publisher to begin a new fantasy magazine, Coven 13, which AHL edited for 4 issues Sep 1969-Mar 1970 before the title passed to William L. CRAWFORD. The 4-part serial "Let There Be Magick" in Coven 13, by AHL as James R. Keaveney, became A World Called Camelot (1969-70; rev 1976) as by AHL, and was followed in the same series by Camelot in Orbit (1978), The Magick of Camelot (1981) and Home - To Avalon (1982). In the first novel a cultural engineer, or "Adjuster", is sent from Earth to the second planet of Fomalhaut, known as Camelot, a world where MAGIC works, rather as in Christopher STASHEFF's Warlock series. Sf meets SWORD AND SORCERY in a whimsical manner throughout the series, whose quality deteriorates. The final volume is set on a different world. [PN] LANDIS, GEOFFREY A. (1955- ) US writer of poems and stories, his first story of sf interest being "Elemental" for ASF in 1984. A wide sampling of his poetry appears in Time Frames: A Speculative Poetry Anthology (anth 1991 chap) ed Terry A.Garey; a relatively limited selection of his adventurous and various short fiction is assembled as Myths, Legends, and True History (coll 1991). [JC] LANDIS, MARIE [r] Brian HERBERT. LAND OF THE GIANTS US tv series (1968-70). An Irwin Allen Production for 20th Century-Fox TV/ABC. Created Irwin ALLEN, also executive prod. Writers included Bob and Esther Mitchell, Bob and Wanda Duncan, Richard Shapiro, Dan Ullman, William Welch. Dirs included Harry Harris, Nathan Juran, Sobey Martin, Irwin Allen (1st episode only). Regular cast Gary Conway, Kurt Kasznar, Don Marshall, Heather Young, Don Matheson, Deanna Lund, Stefan Arngrim. Special effects L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank, Emil Kosa Jr. 2 seasons, 51 50min episodes. Colour.Carrying on in the tradition of such films as DR CYCLOPS and The INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN ( GREAT AND SMALL) as well as an earlier tv series, WORLD OF GIANTS, the first episode showed 7 people aboard a future "stratocruiser" passing through a space/time-warp into a world similar to 20th-century Earth, but where all things, including people, are 12 times larger. The series concerned their predictable encounters with giant people and giant props. Three novelizations by Murray LEINSTER are Land of the Giants * (1968), Land of the Giants #2: The Hot Spot * (1969) and #3: Unknown Danger * (1969). Others were Land of the Giants: Flight of Fear * (1969) by Carl Henry RATHJEN and Land of the Giants: The Mean City * (1969) by James Bradwell. [JB/PN] LANDOLFI, TOMMASO (1908-1979) Italian writer, active as an author of short fictions from 1929. Three selections have appeared in English: Gogol's Wife and Other Stories (coll trans Raymond Rosenthal, John Longrigg and Wayland Young 1963 US), Cancerqueen and Other Stories (coll trans Raymond Rosenthal 1971 US) - which includes the short title novel, Cancroregina (1950; first trans Jack Murphy as "Cancroregina" 1950 Botteghe Oscure), about a mad astronaut imprisoned in a living starship - and Words in Commotion and Other Stories (coll trans Kathrine Jason 1986 US), a volume taken mostly from La piu belle pagine di Tommaso Landolfi ["The Best Pages of Tommaso Landolfi"] (coll 1982), a compilation introduced by Italo CALVINO, who compares TL to writers like VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM. TL's laconic, surreal, testing FABULATIONS, which also resemble those of Jorge Luis BORGES and Franz KAFKA, clearly influenced Calvino in turn. [JC] LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, THE Film (1975). Amicus. Dir Kevin Connor, starring Doug McClure, John McEnery, Susan Penhaligon. Screenplay Michael MOORCOCK, James CAWTHORN, adapted from The Land that Time Forgot (1924) by Edgar Rice BURROUGHS. 95 mins. Colour.This UK film was the first of 3 LOST-WORLD Burroughs adaptations produced by Amicus, the others being AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1976) and The PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977). A German U-boat - with a contingent of male Germans, Britons and one American, plus a young woman - discovers Caprona, a long-lost landmass near the South Pole. It is crawling with prehistoric monsters and cavemen who do their best to destroy the invaders, with little success. The film ends with a volcanic eruption and the marooning of the hero and heroine. The various monsters are unconvincing. The script by Moorcock and Cawthorn was altered extensively by the producers. [JB] LANE, JANE Pseudonym of UK writer Elaine Dakers (1905-1978), author of many esteemed historical novels. Her post- HOLOCAUST sf novel, A State of Mind (1964), is set in an ORWELL-like DYSTOPIA. [JC] LANE, JOHN Dennis HUGHES. LANE, MARY E. BRADLEY (? -? ) US writer of whom nothing is known other than that she may have been the author of Mizora: A Prophecy: A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of Princess Vera Zarovitch: Being a True and Faithful Account of her Journey to the Interior of the Earth, with a Careful Description of the Country and its Inhabitants, their Customs, Manners and Government (Cincinatti Commercial 1880-81; 1890 anon; 1975, with 2 prefaces, as by Mary E. Bradley Lane). This obscure, part-radical, part-conservative UTOPIA is set mainly within a HOLLOW EARTH, where an all-woman society ( FEMINISM) whose children are produced by parthenogenesis has an advanced technology and stringent laws: they have eliminated brunettes and all men, and by eugenics have produced a race of blonde superwomen. With men gone, crime is gone. The book is notable for the ruthlessness of its social speculations, quite extreme for 19th-century utopian writing. [PN] LANG, ALLEN KIM (1928- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Machine of Klamugra" for Planet Stories in 1950 and wrote a good number of action stories in the following decade. Wild and Outside (1966) sends a US baseball shortstop to subdue a planet of alien musclemen. [JC] LANG, ANDREW (1844-1912) Scottish man of letters well known for a wide range of literary activity, including novels, poetry, belles-lettres, anthropology, children's books and (perhaps most familiar to current readers) anthologies of traditional fables and tales retold for children, with some added hagiographical and historical material, much of the work being done by his wife; numerous volumes followed the first of these, The Blue Fairy Book (anth 1889). The rather delicate fantasy content of many of his children's tales gives them a nostalgic interest for some adults today; representative are: The Princess Nobody: a Tale of Fairy Land (1884 chap; rev vt In Fairyland 1979 chap US);The Gold of Fairnilee (1888); Prince Prigio (1889) and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia: Being the Adventures of Prince Prigio's Son (1893), which has a trip to the Moon on a flying horse, both titles being assembled as My Own Fairy Book (omni 1895); and Tales of a Fairy Court (coll 1906), which contains more Prince Prigio stories.Some of AL's adult fiction contains more bracing material, however, though Much Darker Days (1884; rev 1885) as by A. Huge Longway, which parodies Dark Days (1884) by Hugh Conway (1847-1885), does so without venturing into the sensational fantasies of its target, and That Very Mab (1885), written with May Kendall - the pseudonym of Emma Goldworth (1861-?1931) - and published anon, is a rather feeble SATIRE involving the return of the fairy queen to a 19th-century England where (we discover incidentally) interplanetary travel exists. The title story of In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories (coll 1886) is less ineffectual in its dramatization of the dictum that one man's paradise is another man's hell. In the same volume, "The Romance of the First Radical" is an early example of anthropological sf ( ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN), predating H.G. WELLS's "A Story of the Stone Age" (1897) by more than a decade. Why-Why, a revolutionary Ice Age citizen, falls in love with Verva, asks intolerable questions of his tribe, and comes to a sad end. "The End of Phaeacia" (same volume) is a lost-race ( LOST WORLDS) tale in which a missionary is shipwrecked on a South Sea ISLAND that turns out to be the Homeric Phaeacia. The Mark of Cain (1886) introduces, late in the action, a flying machine as deus ex machina to solve a court case. Some of the pieces collected in Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (coll 1890) represent a forerunner format for the writing of RECURSIVE SF.Considerably more durable is AL's collaboration with his friend H. Rider HAGGARD, whose She (1887) he parodied in He (1887), written with Walter Herries Pollock (1850-1926) and published anon. After this, AL joined with Haggard to write The World's Desire (1890), a novel which combines Haggard's crude, sometimes haunting vigour and AL's chastely pastel classicism; despite occasional longueurs, the resulting tale of Odysseus's last journey to find Helen in Egypt is a moving, frequently eloquent romance, coming to a climax with Odysseus's discovery that Helen is the avatar of Ayesha (of Haggard's She) and his death at the hands of his son. The Disentanglers (coll of linked stories 1901 chap US; much exp 1902 UK), AL's last book of adult fiction, is fundamentally uncategorizable, though its sections have some resemblance to the CLUB STORY; some of its episodes deal with submarines, occult sects, spectres and so forth, all used - as Roger Lancelyn GREEN noted in the best work on AL, Andrew Lang (1946) - to replace the traditional "magical devices of the fairy tale" with the latest scientific developments, though retaining the magical function. Copious, but flawed by a disheartening dilettantism, AL's work lies just the wrong side of major ranking in the sf/fantasy field, just as in his other areas of concentration. [JC]Other works: Pictures at Play, or Dialogues of the Galleries (coll 1888) with W.E. Henley (1849-1903), as by Two Art-Critics; A Monk of Fife: A Romance of the Days of Jeanne d'Arc (1895); When it was Light: A Reply to "When it was Dark" (1906), an anon response to Guy THORNE's 1903 novel; Tales of Troy and Greece (coll 1907). LANG, FRITZ (1890-1976) Austrian film-maker who, after trouble with the Nazis, left Germany for France in 1933 and emigrated to the USA in 1934. He was originally trained as an architect but preferred the graphic arts; during the years before WWI he supported himself as a cartoonist and caricaturist. He turned to writing after being wounded during WWI, producing several popular thrillers and fantasy romances. After WWI ended he entered the German film industry and began directing a series of lavish melodramas, such as Die Spinnen (1919; vt The Spiders), many of which were sf-related, involving lost races ( LOST WORLDS), technology-driven plots to take over the world, etc. In this vein was the first Dr Mabuse film, DR MABUSE, DER SPIELER (1922; vt Dr Mabuse, the Gambler). In 1923-4 he made a majestic 6hr fantasy, based directly on the myth rather than on Wagner: Die Nibelungen (released as 2 separate films, Siegfrieds Tod [vt Siegfried] and Kriemhilds Rache [vt Krimhild's Revenge]). Like all FL's German films, this was cowritten with his wife, Thea VON HARBOU. In 1925 he started work on another epic, his first real sf film, METROPOLIS (1926); it is deservedly the most celebrated of all sf films of the silent period. Von Harbau novelized the script as Metropolis * (1926; trans anon 1927 UK). FL's other major sf film was Die FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt The Girl in the Moon); von Harbou's novelization, Frau im Mond * (1928; trans Baroness von Hutten as The Girl in the Moon 1930 UK; cut vt The Rocket to the Moon; From the Novel, The Girl in the Moon 1930 US) was published in Germany before the film was released.FL's German films of the 1930s included the famous murder movie M (1931), which introduced Peter Lorre, and Das Testament des Dr Mabuse (1933; vt The Testament of Dr Mabuse). The latter, parts of which were interpreted as anti-Nazi, involved the master criminal operating through hypnotic powers and even undergoing a form of REINCARNATION, transferring his mind into the body of the director of the lunatic asylum in which he had been locked up at the end of the previous film.FL directed 22 films during his first 25 years in the USA, mostly low-budget though often impressive thrillers, such as Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937) and The Big Heat (1953). The nearest thing to another sf film he ever directed was his last film, made back in Germany, Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE (1960; vt The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse; vt The Diabolical Dr Mabuse). The influence of FL's harsh, expressive style on genre cinema, especially on thrillers, psychological thrillers and sf films, has been incalculable. He was a master at depicting the compulsiveness and the politics of power, and most film critics regard him as a great director. [PN/JB]Further reading: The Cinema of Fritz Lang (1969 US) by Paul M. Jensen; Fritz Lang (1976 UK) by Lotte Eisner; Fritz Lang: The Image & The Look (1981 US) by Stephen Jenkins.See also: CINEMA; CITIES; COMICS; GERMANY; ROCKETS. LANG, HERRMANN (? -? ) Ostensibly a German writer and professor in the Polytechnic School at Karlsruhe, with publications in chemistry. However, there seems to have been no German edition of his sf novel, The Air Battle: A Vision of the Future (ostensibly trans 1859), and HL is most likely the pseudonym of a UK writer. The novel presents in short compass a remarkable portrait of a world several millennia hence, long after European civilization has been destroyed by floods and earthquakes; the peace-loving Black rulers of the country of Sahara dominate Africa, and in a final battle with other powers utilize their great heavier-than-air machines to establish a beneficial hegemony over the world. Remarkably for a novel of this period, miscegenation is strongly approved of, and the White woman whose adventures the plot traces is destined to marry a Black man. [JC]See also: HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; POLITICS; WAR. LANG, KING House name used by CURTIS WARREN on several sf novels: five by David GRIFFITHS and 1 each by George HAY, Brian HOLLOWAY, John William JENNISON and E.C. TUBB. [JC] LANG, SIMON Pseudonym of US screenwriter and author Darlene Hartman (1934- ). SL's SPACE OPERAS - All the Gods of Eisernon (1973) and continuing with The Elluvon Gift (1975) - constitute a loose series, both featuring the Terran starship Skipjack and both set in the same galactic venue. The first novel is the more ambitious, presenting in the planet Eisernon an idyllic picture of an ALIEN race ecologically integrated with Nature. More formally, as Voyages of the Skipjack, the sequence continues with The Trumpets of Tagan (1992), Timeslide (1993) and Hopeship (1994). Aliens, friendly and otherwise, are frequently met; and in general the Skipjack books do sometimes suffer from some resemblance to STAR TREK, for which SL had written. [JC] LANGART, DARREL T. Randall GARRETT. LANGE, HELLMUTH [r] GERMANY. LANGE, JOHN Michael CRICHTON. LANGE, OLIVER (1927- ) A pseudonym. In OL's Vandenberg (1971; vt Defiance: An American Novel 1984) the eponymous hero fights to the death against Soviet takeover of the USA, retreating to the Rocky Mountains to die undefeated. [JC] LANGELAAN, GEORGE (1908- ) French-born UK writer and journalist, active for many years in the USA before returning to France. His collection of sf/horror stories, Out of Time (coll 1964 UK), includes "The Fly" (1957), a macabre story of an unsuccessful experiment in MATTER TRANSMISSION, in which the scientist ends up with the head of a fly. It was filmed as The FLY (1958), with various sequels. He has published several works in French, including Nouvelles de l'anti-monde ["Tales of the Anti-World"] (coll 1962) and Le vol de l'anti-g ["The Flight of Anti-G"] (1967). [JC/PN] LANGFORD, DAVID (ROWLAND) (1953- ) UK writer, critic and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 8 HUGO awards for fan writing - some of the best of his over 450 pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US) ed Ben Yalow - plus 1 Best FANZINE Hugo for his self-produced news magazine, ANSIBLE. DL began to publish sf with "Heatwave" for New Writings in SF 27 (anth 1975) ed Kenneth BULMER. His first book-length fiction, An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871 (1979) as by William Robert Loosley and ed DL, centres on a spoof 19th-century report of a Close Encounter; its main narrative was summarized as if factual, without permission or payment, by Whitley STRIEBER in his "fiction based on fact", Majestic (1989). In DL's one serious novel, The Space Eater (1982), emissaries from a devastated Earth are sent by an unpleasant form of MATTER TRANSMISSION to a distant colony planet, where they must stop the local military from ripping the fabric of the Universe. The Leaky Establishment (1984), borderline sf, hilariously examines a crisis involving lost nuclear warheads at what many readers have assumed is Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (where DL, who has an MA in physics, worked 1975-80). In Earthdoom! (1987) with John Grant (Paul BARNETT), a parody of the DISASTER-novel genre and of countless sf CLICHES, a multitude of catastrophes afflicts the world, more or less simultaneously. The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge: Odyssey Two (coll 1988) assembles parodies of sf and fantasy writers. Though some of his short fiction is entirely serious, DL remains best known for the witty and ironic humour of his fan writing - perhaps best distilled in the fanzine Twll Ddu (1976-83) - and most of his full-length fiction, although it is sometimes over-broad. It is surprising that a writer so obviously gifted has as yet produced so little sf of real substance.DL has also written, often in collaboration, a variety of nonfiction texts of sf interest, all imaginatively conceived and soundly based: War in 2080: The Future of Military Technology (1979), Fact and Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions (1981) with Chris MORGAN, The Science in Science Fiction (1982) with Peter NICHOLLS and Brian STABLEFORD, Micromania: The Whole Truth about Home Computers (1984), which is a reworking for the UK market of Charles PLATT's Micromania: The Whole-Truth Home Computer Handbook (1984), and The Third Millennium (A History of the World: AD 2000-3000) (1985) with Stableford. [JC/NT]Other works: The Necronomicon (anth 1978) ed George HAY, DL's contribution being to construct a hoax history of the "lost occult text" invented by H.P. LOVECRAFT; The Transatlantic Hearing Aid (1985 chap), nonfiction; A Novacon Garland (coll 1985 chap dos), fiction and nonfiction; Critical Assembly: The First 50 White Dwarf Columns (coll 1987), book reviews; Platen Stories (coll 1987 chap);Critical Assembly II: The Rest of the White Dwarf (and GM, and GMI) Review Columns (coll 1992), book reviews; Irrational Numbers (coll 1994 chap US).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; BLACK HOLES; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; COSMOLOGY; GENETIC ENGINEERING; HUMOUR; HYPERSPACE; IMMORTALITY; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; PREDICTION; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; UFOS; UTOPIAS; WEAPONS. LANGUAGES LINGUISTICS. LANIER, STERLING E(DMUND) (1927- ) US editor and writer. SEL did 6 years' graduate work at the School of Anthropology and Archeology at the University of Pennsylvania before working as an editor, mainly for Chilton Books for periods during 1961-7; he persuaded the firm to publish Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup 1965). He subsequently turned freelance, working as as a sculptor and jeweller and as a writer.His first published story was "Join our Gang?" for ASF in 1961, but the majority of his short work belongs to the Brigadier Ffellowes series published in FSF. Like Lord DUNSANY's Jorkens stories or Arthur C. CLARKE's Tales from the White Hart (coll 1957), the Ffellowes tales are examples of the CLUB STORY, as narrated by the eponymous brigadier; they mostly involve the irruption of mythical creatures into the real world. They are assembled in The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (coll 1972) and The Curious Quest of Brigadier Ffellowes (coll 1986). SEL's first novel was a good children's fantasy, The War for the Lot (1969), about a young boy telepathically selected to defend a tract of wilderness from city rats. His second remains his most important: Hiero's Journey (1973) - and its sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero (1983), both being assembled as Hiero Desteen (omni 1984) - is a long and inventive quest tale set in a teeming post- HOLOCAUST world 5000 years after an atomic war. Radiation dangers and recidivist mutant SCIENTISTS still haunt this venue, threatening Hiero, who treks down from Canada searching for a mythical COMPUTER which might help reconstruct things. In the second volume, which returns to the plot of The War for the Lot, Hiero telepathically marshals some animal allies and fights off an invasion of the Unclean Masters. Not precisely innovative, the sequence succeeds through its author's fluent and ingeniously varied cast of characters. A later singleton, Menace under Marswood (1983), tamely repeats some of the same material on a terraformed MARS. [JC/MJE]See also: FANTASTIC VOYAGES; MUTANTS; MYTHOLOGY. LAO SHE [r] CHINESE SF. LARGE, E(RNEST) C(HARLES) (? -1976) UK plant pathologist and occasional fiction writer. Sugar in the Air (1937) is a notable and original sf novel bitterly describing the conflicts which arise between scientific and commercial interests during the development of an industrial process of artificial photosynthesis. Its sequel, Asleep in the Afternoon (1939), is a SATIRE whose frame narrative about the tribulations of an author is interwoven with a frivolous sf story about a device for inducing sleep. In the more adventurous sarcastic fantasy Dawn in Andromeda (1956) God translocates a representative sample of humanity by way of experiment; the political evolution of the community and the spontaneous regeneration of RELIGION confound the UTOPIAN schemes of the original group but cannot suppress mechanical progress. [BS]See also: DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY. LARSON, GLEN A. (1937- ) US TELEVISION producer, perhaps best known as producer of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (from 1978). However, GL had been long involved with tv previously, being responsible for Quincy, McCloud, BJ and the Bear and other non-sf programmes before he turned to sf. All the sf tv series that GAL has produced have been simplistic, grossly formulaic, and generally contemptuous of science; in interviews he has adopted a cavalier attitude about the various SCIENTIFIC ERRORS pointed out to him. However, he remained loyal to sf/fantasy programming on tv for a number of years. Subsequent series of this kind for which he received the "Created by" credit include: the Battlestar Galactica sequel-series GALACTICA 1980 (1980); BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (1979-81); his most successful series, Knight Rider, 4 seasons, 83 episodes 1982-6, starring David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight, the former police officer almost killed in an accident who is given a new identity and groovy futuristic car controlled by a COMPUTER called KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), to help him catch bad people as a kind of licensed vigilante; Manimal, 8 episodes 1983, about a shapeshifting crimefighter, Jonathan Case (Simon MacCorkindale), who catches bad people by adopting the guise of panther, eagle, etc.; Automan, 11 episodes 1983-4, starring Desi Arnaz Jr as the computer expert who creates Automan (Chuck Wagner), the world's first living holographic image, to catch bad people; and The Highwayman, 10 episodes 1987-8, another road-movie series in which future law enforcers, Highwaymen, use futuristic vehicles to catch bad people, starring Sam Jones.GL was given cover credit for writing, always in collaboration, the Battlestar Galactica series of tied novels, including Battlestar Galactica * (1978) with Robert THURSTON, Battlestar Galactica #2: The Cylon Death Machine * (1979) with Thurston, #3: The Tombs of Kobol * (1979) with Thurston, #4: The Young Warriors * (1980) with Thurston, #5: Galactica Discovers Earth * (1980) with Michael RESNICK, #6: The Living Legend * (1982) with Nicholas Yermakov, #7: War of the Gods * (1982) with Yermakov, #8: Greetings from Earth * (1983) with Ron GOULART, #9: Experiment in Terra * (1984) with Goulart, #10: The Long Patrol * (1984) with Goulart, #11: The Nightmare Machine * (1985) with Thurston, #12: "Die, Chameleon!" * (1986) with Thurston, #13: Apollo's War * (1987) with Thurston and #14: Surrender the Galactica! * (1987) with Thurston. With Roger Hill, GL wrote a series of Knight Rider ties: Knight Rider * (1983), #2: Trust Doesn't Rust * (1984), #3: Hearts of Stone * (1984),#4: The 24-Carat Assassin * (1984 UK).and#5: Mirror Image * (1985 UK) [PN/JC]Other works: The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula * (1978) with Michael Sloan. LA SALLE, VICTOR House name used on early paperback sf novels published by John Spencer & Co. (later BADGER BOOKS). Menace from Mercury (1954) was the first-published novel of the prolific R.L. FANTHORPE (his only VLS title). Dawn of the Half-Gods (1953) and Twilight Zone (1954) were by John S. GLASBY. The remainder were: The Black Sphere (1951) by Gerald EVANS, After the Atom (1953) by Leonard G. FISH, and Assault from Infinity (1953), The Seventh Dimension (1953) and Suns in Duo (1953), all by Tom W. WADE. [SH/MJE] LASERBLAST Film (1978). Irwin Yablans. Prod Charles BAND. Dir Michael Rae, starring Kim Milford, Cheryl Smith, Gianni Russo. Screenplay Franne Schacht, Frank Ray Perilli. 80 mins. Colour.In this ill made, low-budget exploitation movie a miserable teenager finds in the desert an amulet and a laser left by ALIENS. The amulet makes his eyes glow red; taken over by the alien persona, he revenges himself with the laser on people who pick on him, also exploding many cars and a Star Wars poster before the returning aliens get him. [PN] LASER BOOKS Canadian sf imprint initiated in 1975 by Harlequin Books, the US publisher of Mills & Boon romances, under the editorship of Roger ELWOOD. The books were restricted to a formula which specified a male protagonist, an upbeat ending, no sex or atheism, and a minimum of long words. All Laser Book covers were the work of Frank Kelly FREAS. The series was suspended early in 1977 after 57 books had appeared. The Laser formula made it unlikely that books of any literary quality would be published, but some were interesting, including K.W. JETER's debut, Seeklight (1975), and Ray NELSON's Blake's Progress (1975; rev vt Timequest 1985 US). [MJE] LASKI, MARGHANITA (1915-1988) UK writer, one of the most prolific contributors of material (over 250,000 wordslips) to the Oxford English Dictionary. Though she was not an avowed author of sf, her work often edged snappishly into the fantastic, and she early demonstrated an uncircumscribed sense of good writing in The Patchwork Book: A Pilot Omnibus for Children (anth 1946), whose sf contents included several stories by H. Rider HAGGARD, Edgar Allan POE, Jules VERNE and others. Love on the Super-Tax (1944) borders on sf in its depiction of a wartime transformation of the UK. Tory Heaven (1948) is a class-ridden spoof UTOPIA set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD UK in which the Conservative Party has won the 1945 election. The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953) is a fantasy in which two invalids, 100 years apart, switch identities. The Offshore Island (written 1954; 1959 chap) is a strongly pacifist sf play set in a UK continuing to suffer the effects of nuclear HOLOCAUST after 10 years of war. It stingingly condemns (while linking) the sexual prudery and political ruthlessness of the great powers. Two volumes of nonfiction - Ecstasy (1961) and Everyday Ecstasy (1980) - deal sympathetically with categories of experience often used within the genre as agents or symbols of transition to a better world. [JC]Other works: The Tower (1974 chap US). LASSWITZ, KURD (1848-1910) German Kantean philosopher, historian of science, novelist and short-story writer. As the first major sf writer in German, he holds the same place in GERMANY as do H.G. WELLS in the UK and Jules VERNE in France. He taught philosophy for many years at the Gymnasium Ernestinum in Gotha, and it is symptomatic of 19th-century German intellectual culture that he irradiated his fiction with theoretical speculation; there is no KL fiction without a lesson. In "German Theories of Science Fiction" (1976 Science-Fiction Studies) William B. Fischer claims on KL's behalf that many of his ideas directly prefigure later critics' use of terms like "extrapolation" and "analogue", and translates as follows from KL's introduction to the short-story collection Bilder aus der Zukunft ["Images of the Future"] (coll 1878): "Many inferences about the future can be drawn from the historical course of civilization and the present state of science; and analogy offers itself to fantasy as an ally." The seriousness of KL's didactic impulse can be seen in the strong emphasis he places in his fiction on establishing a plausible imaginary world whose hypothetical nature will be governed, and given verisimilitude, by the resemblance to scientific method evident in its realization.Unsurprisingly, the stories that embody these overriding concerns tend to be more effective as broad technological and scientific canvases than as studies in character. The tales collected in Bilder aus der Zukunft read consequently almost like illustrated tours of various "superior terrestrial cultures located in the future". (A short story from this volume was published in Overland Monthly in 1890 as "Pictures of the Future".) Further short stories are collected in Seifenblasen ["Soap Bubbles"] (coll 1890), 2 stories from this volume appearing (trans Willy LEY 1953 and 1955) in FSF, and Nie und Nimmer ["Never, Ever"] (coll 1902); 2 sf novels, Aspira (1906) and Sternentau ["Star Dew"] (1909), have not been translated into English.KL's major work is his long sf novel, Auf zwei Planeten (1897; cut 1948; cut again 1969; trans Hans J. Rudnick, much cut, as Two Planets 1971 US), in which mankind confronts a superior Martian culture when a Martian SPACE HABITAT is discovered above the North Pole along with an enclave at the pole itself. After useless defiance of the Martians, Earth is put under a benign protectorate, and humans gradually begin a process of self-improvement at the same time that the Martians on Earth become decadent. Ultimately mankind rebels, equality between the two planets is established, and Earth seems destined to a UTOPIAN future. The book incorporates much technological speculation, including details about life on MARS - based on the theories of Percival Lowell (1855-1916) - possible alien forms of biology ( XENOBIOLOGY), and the nature of mankind, actual and potential. It was deeply influential upon at least two generations of German youth, as the epigraph to the 1971 translation by Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) attests; and E.F. BLEILER has speculated that it was important in shaping Hugo GERNSBACK's "technologically based liberalism".In 1981, the Kurd Lasswitz AWARDS were established to honour, in a fashion meant to reflect the HUGO, the best German sf published during the previous year. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF; INVASION. LAST BATTLE, THE Le DERNIER COMBAT . LAST DAYS OF MAN ON EARTH, THE The FINAL PROGRAMME . LAST MAN ON EARTH, THE L' ULTIMO UOMO DELLA TERRA. LAST STARFIGHTER, THE Film (1984). Lorimar/Universal. Dir Nick Castle, starring Lance Guest, Dan O'Herlihy, Catherine Mary Stewart, Norman Snow, Robert Preston. Screenplay Jonathan Betuel. 101 mins. Colour.In this cheerful, derivative wish-fulfilment story, Alex (Guest), who lives in a trailer park, is a teenage whiz at computer arcade games. Attaining the highest-ever score on the Starfighter game, he is conscripted (though at first refusing) by its inventor, an alien (Preston), to play a real-life version of the game in a real starfighter and so save the Galaxy from the invasion of the Ko-Dan Empire. While he is offworld, his place on Earth is taken by a robot simulacrum; this leads to amusing problems. Made for a juvenile audience, TLS is achieved with such good humour (and interesting computer animation for the space battles) that it survives its silliness to become quite a good film. The novelization is The Last Starfighter * (1984) by Alan Dean FOSTER. (For further discussion of computer-game/real-life confusions CYBERSPACE; VIRTUAL REALITY.) [PN] LAST WOMAN ON EARTH Film (1960). Filmgroup. Prod and dir Roger CORMAN, starring Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland, Edward Wain (pseudonym of Robert Towne). Screenplay Towne. 71 mins. Colour.For unexplained reasons (war?) the world is drained of oxygen for several hours; the lone survivors (as far as we know) are three scuba divers: two men (one wealthy and aggressive, one effete and intellectual) and the first man's wife. Scientifically silly and poorly acted, with scriptwriter Towne - later celebrated for Chinatown (1974) and other films-called in to play the intellectual part at the last minute, LWOE still has compelling moments. For a quickie-movie the script is remarkably mannered; yet it may be a sharper, less sentimental film than the more famous The WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959), on which it was presumably modelled. [PN] LATHAM, PHILIP Pseudonym used for his sf by US astronomer Robert Shirley Richardson (1902-1981). He began publishing sf in the magazines in 1946 with "N-Day" for ASF, and continued to 1977, with 20 or so stories in all; many had astronomical themes ( ASTRONOMY). The most anthologized is "The Xi Effect" (1950), in which Earth is found to be in a segment of the Universe that is contracting. Many of the later stories, oddly, are as much about MAGIC as they are HARD SF. PL wrote two CHILDREN'S SF stories: Five against Venus (1952) and Missing Men of Saturn (1953), and around the same time also wrote scripts for the juvenile tv series CAPTAIN VIDEO. As Robert S. Richardson he wrote astronomical articles for sf magazines, the story "Kid Anderson" (1962), the semifictional Second Satellite (1956), and over 10 books on astronomy, including the juvenile Exploring Mars (1954; vt Man and the Planets UK). [PN]See also: DISASTER; OUTER PLANETS; PHYSICS; SCIENTISTS; SUN; VENUS. LATHE OF HEAVEN, THE Made-for-tv film (1980). TV Laboratory WNET/13, New York, for PBS. Prod and dir David R. Loxton and Fred Baryzk, starring Bruce Davison, Kevin Conway, Margaret Avery. Teleplay Roger E. Swaybill, Diane English, based on The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula K. LE GUIN. 120 mins. Colour.Made outside the commercial system for Public Television, this may be the best sf tv-movie ever made, with innovative use of existing reality (futuristic high-rises in Dallas, for example) substituting for expensive sets. The visual consultant was Ed EMSHWILLER. The story of George Orr (Davison), who can dream permanent changes to reality, is both here and in Le Guin's chilling original a moral fable rather like the fairy-tales about three wishes. Orr's talent is exploited by an ambitious psychiatrist (Conway), but every time he tries to dream a better world something frightful goes wrong, OVERPOPULATION being cured by plague or, later, racism cured by everybody turning grey. The deliquescence of reality, whose binding glue is ultimately in danger of dissolving (the ending is ambiguous), is subtly caught, and the viewer has to be observant to register every change. [PN]See also: VIRTUAL REALITY. LATIN AMERICA Although deeply influenced by US-UK sf, modern sf in Latin America is also affected by the fantastic traditions of Indian and colonial times, and in some instances by a conscious decision to depart from English-speaking traditions. "Anglo-Saxon sf explores in one way: the way in which Anglo-Saxons think and feel," writes Argentinian critic and author Claudio Omar Noguerol. "Latin-American sf explores as only a person immersed in the turbulence of Latin America can do it."Since the continent produces very little technology and scientific research but is a consumer (and sometimes victim) of technological advance, its sf has stressed the social, economic and political costs of progress. In that respect, Latin-American sf has paralleled the NEW-WAVE movement of the 1960s in the US and UK, with the added advantage (albeit dubious) of not being restricted by the market pressures of pulp publishing: in most Latin-American countries publishers have yet to exploit the commercial potential of sf. Sf as a literary pursuit is more notable than in countries where mass-marketability is a requisite. Sf novels are relatively scarce; sf is more often than not in the form of short fiction and, frequently, POETRY. Its authors are commonly social scientists or professional writers, only a very few coming from the ranks of the hard sciences.Latin-American sf is also very close to the political turmoil that surrounds it, and has frequently been the only available channel for social criticism when and where military dictatorships have been in control. Therefore, although there is a certain overall Latin-American identity, it is not always easy to generalize. Argentina, Cuba and Mexico, for instance, have such widely different histories, geographies, political systems and inhabitants that sometimes the Spanish language (and some universal aspirations) are the only common ground shared by their literature; in the case of Portuguese-speaking Brazil there is also the language barrier. Unfortunately, US and UK market conditions have made it almost impossible for Spanish- or Portuguese-language sf writers to publish in those countries.ArgentinaUnder the influence of such writers of the fantastic as Macedonio Fernandez (1874-1952), the Uruguayan-born Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), Roberto Arlt (1900-1942) and Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938) - as well as the undefinable work of Jorge Luis BORGES, which often borders on unconventional sf - and of sf precursors such as E.L. Holmberg (1852-1937), author of Viaje maravilloso del senor Nic Nac ["The Wonderful Voyage of Mr Nic Nac"] (1875), the magazine Mas alla ["Beyond"] (1953-7) published 48 issues featuring the work of the first modern generation of sf writers in the country. The second generation - heralded by the short-lived magazine Revista de ciencia ficcion y fantasia ["Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy"] (1977)-arrived in the 1970s and 1980s and has been especially interested in social issues as well as language; sf's rebirth was in part due to the downfall of the military regime. This allowed the creation of the Circulo Argentino de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia ["Argentinian Circle of Science Fiction and Fantasy"] and the publishing of several FANZINES (Unicornia azul, Nuevomundo, Clepsidra and Sinergia, among others, plus Axxon, published in diskette form) as well as professional magazines, like Parsec and Minotauro, and scores of books. Argentina hosts the annual South-American sf and fantasy convention, Consur.Among the best known Argentinian authors are Borges, Adolfo BIOY CASARES and Angelica Gorodischer (1929- ), whose 2-vol Kalpa Imperial ["Imperial Kalpa"] (coll vol 1 1983, vol 2 1984) is one of the best stylistic examples of modern Latin-American sf, though she sometimes veers towards pure fantasy. Other books by her are Opus dos ["Opus Two"] (coll 1967), Bajo las jubeas en flor ["Under the Flowering Jubeas"] (coll 1973) and Casta luna electronica ["Chaste Electric Moon"] (coll 1977). The work of Eduardo Goligorski (1931- ), author of A la sombra de los barbaros ["Under the Shadow of the Barbarians"] (coll 1977), is closer to conventional sf. He became one of the few Latin-American writers to publish in FSF - with "When the Birds Die" (1967)-and edited the most representative 1960s Argentinian sf anthology, Los argentinos en la Luna ["Argentinians on the Moon"] (anth 1968). Other writers include: Carlos Gardini, author of Mi cerebro animal ["My Animal Brain"] (1983) and Sinfonia cero ["Zero Symphony"] (1984); Magdalena Moujan Otano; Emilio Rodrigue, author of Plenipotencia ["Full Powers"] (coll 1967); Alberto Vanasco (1925- ), who collaborated with Goligorski in Memorias del futuro ["Memories of the Future"] (anth 1966) and Adios al manana ["Goodbye to Tomorrow"] (anth 1966); Daniel Barbieri (1951- ), author of Domun (1991); Spanish-born Marcial Souto (1947- ), author of Para bajar a un pozo de estrellas ["To Go Down a Well of Stars"] (coll 1985); and Sergio Gaut vel Hartman (1947- ), author of Cuerpos descartables ["Disposable Bodies"] (coll 1985).CubaSf in Cuba originated in the poetry of Oscar Hurtado (1919-1977), as in La ciudad muerta de Korad ["The Dead City of Korad"] (1964), and the stories and novels of Angel Arango (1926- ), which include (?A donde van los cefalomos? ["Where do the Cephalhoms Go?"] (coll 1964), El planeta negro ["The Black Planet"] (coll 1966), Robotomaquia ["Robotomachy"] (coll 1967), El arco iris del mono ["The Monkey's Rainbow"] (coll 1980), Transparencia ["Transparency"] (coll 1982) and Coyuntura ["Juncture"] (coll 1984). Cuban sf has been influenced both by Caribbean magical traditions and by Soviet sf-there were no real precedents for Cuban sf before the 1959 revolution. Although no specialized Cuban sf magazines exist, sf stories were well received in most periodical publications and dozens of titles were published every year until, in 1990, Cuban publishing began to suffer severe problems owing to lack of paper.Cuban sf began to find its own identity through the work of Arango and of Miguel Collazo (1936- ), author of El libro fantastico de Oaj ["The Fantastic Book of Oaj"] (1966), El viaje ["The Journey"] (1968), Onoloria and El arco de Belen ["The Arch of Bethlehem"]. It has a strongly political trend but also, less expectedly, purely fantastic and clearly erotic traits, best exemplified by the work of Daina Chaviano (1957- ), first winner in the sf category (established 1979) of the national literary award, the David, with her short-story collection Los mundos que amo ["The Worlds I Love"] (coll 1980). Her other books to date are Amoroso planeta ["Loving Planet"] (coll 1983), Historias de hadas para adultos ["Fairytales for Adults"] (coll 1986), Cuentos de una abuela extraterrestre ["Stories from an Extraterrestrial Grandmother"] (1988) and El abrevadero de los dinosaurios ["The Waterhole of the Dinosaurs"] (coll 1990). Other Cuban sf writers to be noted are: Gregorio Ortega (1926- ), author of Kappa LA TOURETTE, AILEEN (1946- ) US-born writer, in the UK from 1968, whose advocacy of a radical FEMINISM informs most of her work, all of which is sophisticatedly told. Her sf novel, Cry Wolf (1986), however, assays a somewhat jumbled moral scan of the events leading up to a nuclear HOLOCAUST in language both too ornately self-referential and too abstract to convey much of the subsequent shattered world as it attempts to sort truth from myth and to build anew. [JC] LAUMER, (JOHN) KEITH (1925-1993) US writer who used his experiences in the US armed forces and Diplomatic Corps to considerable advantage in his sf work. He served in the army 1943-5, studied architecture and graduated with a BScArch from the University of Illinois in 1952, served in the USAF 1953-6, and then joined the US Foreign Service. He rejoined the USAF as a captain in 1960. He began publishing sf in 1959 with "Greylorn" for AMZ, and for more than a decade remained extremely prolific, producing three major series and two minor ones along with a number of independent novels; after 1973, affected by illness, he published more sparingly.The most interesting of KL's series is the Imperium sequence, comprising his first novel, Worlds of the Imperium (1962 dos; with 2 stories added to make coll, rev 1982), The Other Side of Time (1965) and Assignment in Nowhere (1968) - both assembled as Beyond the Imperium (omni 1981) - and Zone Yellow (1990). The Imperium dominates a complex nest of PARALLEL-WORLDS universes, and strives to maintain the stability of its chosen time-stream. As opposed to the grimmer and perhaps more plausible versions of the same task expressed in novels like Barrington BAYLEY's The Fall of Chronopolis (1974 US), KL takes an essentially optimistic view of this kind of situation, treating it in a no-nonsense, problem-solving manner. Also related, if only thematically, to the Imperium series is Dinosaur Beach (1971), a tale of TIME PARADOXES in which a role similar to that of the Imperium is played by Nexx Central. A second series, the parallel-worlds comic novels featuring Lafayette O'Leary - The Time Bender (1966), The World Shuffler (1970), The Shape Changer (1972) and The Galaxy Builder (1984) - attempts to replay a similar scenario in terms of slapstick, with only moderate success.KL's other major series depicts the adventures of interstellar diplomatic troubleshooter Jaime Retief on a variety of alien worlds: Envoy to New Worlds (coll 1963; exp vt Retief: Envoy to New Worlds 1987), Galactic Diplomat (coll 1965), Retief's War (1966), Retief and the Warlords (1968), Retief: Ambassador to Space (coll 1969), Retief of the CDT (coll 1971), Retief's Ransom (1971; with new title story added to make coll, rev vt Retief and the Pangalactic Pageant of Pulchritude 1986), Retief: Emissary to the Stars (1975; exp 1979), Retief: Diplomat at Arms (coll 1982), Retief to the Rescue (1983), The Return of Retief (1984), Retief in the Ruins (coll 1986) and Reward for Retief (1989). Retief's unchanging role is to mediate between the residents of alien worlds, some of them nefarious, and his bumbling superiors in the Terran Diplomatic Corps, and to solve various sticky problems, almost all couched in comic terms, sometimes amusingly. Here as elsewhere, the KL bibliography is tangled; putting aside titles which partially replicate earlier titles, Retief collections assembled entirely from earlier volumes include Retief at Large (coll 1978) and Retief Unbound (omni 1979), containing Retief's Ransom plus 5 stories from Envoy to New Worlds.KL's singletons are varied, ranging from broad HUMOUR like The Monitors (1966), filmed as The MONITORS in 1969, to taut, efficient sf thrillers whose structures amalgamate SPACE OPERA and the favourite sf theme of the coming to awareness of the SUPERMAN. Best of them is A Plague of Demons (1965), in which a tough human is biologically engineered into a sort of superman so that he can deal with a threat to Earth, and finds - after a long, remarkably sustained chase sequence ending in his capture by some singularly efficient aliens - that for centuries Earth has been being despoiled of its best fighting men, who, like himself, are taken off-planet and surgically transformed into command centres for gigantic, armed fighting machines embroiled in an eons-long interstellar war. In this CYBORG form, he regains autonomy, organizes a revolt of his fellow cyborg-supertanks and prepares to carry - fabulously armed - his message of freedom to the stars. Thematically associated with this novel are the Bolo books - Bolo: The Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade (coll of linked stories with new linking material 1976) and Rogue Bolo (coll of linked stories 1986), both assembled, with 1 piece missing, as The Compleat Bolo (omni 1990), plus the weak The Stars Must Wait (1990) - which recount the long history of a military unit of constantly upgraded quasisentient tanks.In A Plague of Demons, and in other novels such as A Trace of Memory (1963), The Long Twilight (1969), The House in November (1970; with 1 story added to make coll, rev 1981), Dinosaur Beach and The Infinite Cage (1972), the essential KL superman takes shape: often an orphan, usually a loner, he discovers the world to be a persecuting snare and delusion, and gradually comes to realize that his PARANOIA is justified, for his frustrated human competence is no more than a cloak disguising his true - at times godlike - superiority. Once he has become a superman he is able to transcend the world of normals, and often takes that world over, though behind the scenes. It is for novels in which this wish-fulfilment version of the superman is expressed that KL will be best remembered, though his tendency to repeat earlier inspirations in slackened form seems to have damaged his later efforts even in this favourite mode; books such as The Ultimax Man (1978) or End as a Hero (1985) are significantly weak by comparison with his early work. But at his best KL wrote polished and succinct daydreams of sf transcendence that served as models of their kind. [JC]Other works: The Great Time Machine Hoax (1964); Embassy (1965), an associational novel whose protagonist, Brion Bayard, shares his name but no other circumstances with the hero of the Imperium sequence; Catastrophe Planet (1966; with added pieces to make coll, rev vt The Breaking Earth 1981); Earthblood (1966) with Rosel George BROWN (whom see for details); Nine by Laumer (coll 1967); Galactic Odyssey (1967); Planet Run (1967; with 1 story by each added to make coll, rev 1982) with Gordon R. DICKSON; The Day Before Forever and Thunderhead (coll 1968); The Invaders * (coll 1967; vt The Meteor Men UK) as by Anthony LeBaron and Enemies from Beyond * (coll 1967), adapting stories from The INVADERS ; The Afrit Affair * (1968), The Drowned Queen * (1968) and The Gold Bomb * (1968), adapting stories from The AVENGERS ; Greylorn (coll 1968; vt The Other Sky 1968 UK); It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Galaxy (coll 1968); Time Trap (1970); The Star Treasure (1971; with stories added to make coll, rev 1986); Once There was a Giant (coll 1971), a different book from Once There was a Giant (coll 1984), the first title containing 8 stories, the second 2 novellas; Timetracks (coll 1972); The Big Show (coll 1972); Night of Delusions (1972; with 2 stories added to make coll, rev vt Knight of Delusions 1982); The Glory Game (1973); The Undefeated (coll 1974); The Best of Keith Laumer (coll 1976); Star Colony (fixup 1982); Chrestomathy (coll 1984); Judson's Eden (1991); Alien Minds (coll 1991); Back to the Time Trap (1992).As Editor: Five Fates (anth 1972).About the author: Keith Laumer, Ambassador to Space: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.See also: ALTERNATE WORLDS; GODS AND DEMONS; HIVE-MINDS; INVASION; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; WEAPONS. LAURIE, ANDRE Pseudonym of Paschal Grousset (1845-1909), French politician and author. His first political novel, Le reve d'un irreconciliable ["Dream of a Diehard"] (1869) and several political works were published under his real name, but thereafter he used the AL pseudonym. While living as a communard exile in London, AL wrote the original version of the book which was later published as The Begum's Fortune (1879) as by Jules VERNE. Laurie legally renounced title to the story, as he did with The Southern Star Mystery (1884), rewritten and published as by Verne. Both authors put their name to L'epave du Cynthia (1885; trans as Salvage from the Cynthia 1958 UK). It was a strange collaboration, AL being politically a long way to the left of Verne. Of AL's several sf novels, 5 have been translated into English. The best known is Les exiles de la Terre, Selene Company Limited (1887; trans anon as The Conquest of the Moon: A Story of the Bayouda 1889 UK), in which the MOON is drawn from its orbit to land in the Sahara desert. AL wrote of the discoveries of scientifically advanced societies in The Secret of the Magian, or The Mystery of Ecbatana (1890 France; trans 1891 UK) and Atlantis (1895; trans L.A. Smith as The Crystal City Under the Sea 1896 UK; vt The Crystal City 1896 US), and of a transatlantic tunnel in De New York a Brest en sept heures (1888; trans anon as New York to Brest in Seven Hours 1890 UK). His most critically acclaimed work, Spiridon le muet ["Spiridon the Mute"] (1909 France), remains untranslated. [JE/PN]Other works: Axel Eberson, the Graduate of Upsala (1891 France; trans 1892 UK).See also: BOYS' PAPERS; NEAR FUTURE; UNDER THE SEA. LAVERS, NORMAN (1935- ) US writer whose sf novel, The Northwest Passage (1984), engages in an experiment ( POSTMODERNISM) familiar to readers of the modern novel: the book comprises a "text", complete with a scholarly apparatus which is itself, of course, part of the "text". In this case, a far-future editorial apparatus surrounds the late-20th-century scholarly edition of an 18th-century manuscript. The title proves to have a more than geographical context. [JC] LAVERTY, DONALD Pseudonym used by James BLISH and Damon KNIGHT in collaboration. [JC] LAVOND, PAUL DENNIS [s] C.M. KORNBLUTH; Robert A.W. LOWNDES; Frederik POHL. LAWHEAD, STEPHEN R. (1950- ) US writer of Christian sf and fantasy, beginning with the Dragon King fantasy trilogy: In the Hall of the Dragon King (1982), The Warlords of Nin (1983) and The Sword and the Flame (1984). Of sf interest are Dream Thief (1983) and the Emphyrion sequence: The Search for Fierra (1985) and The Siege of Dome (1986), both titles being assembled as Emphyrion (omni 1990 UK). A further fantasy sequence, the Pendragon Cycle - Taliesin (1987), Merlin (1988),Arthur (1989) and Pendragon (1994) - Christianizes (or re-Christianizes) Arthurian legends. The catechizing impulse evident in earlier titles seems to have been moderated in later productions. [JC]Other works: Howard Had a Spaceship (1986), juvenile; the Song of Albion sequence comprisingThe Paradise War (1991), The Silver Hand (1992) and The Endless Knot (1993). LAWNMOWER MAN, THE Film (1992). Allied Vision Lane Pringle/Fuji Eight Co. Dir Brett Leonard, starring Jeff Fahey, Pierce Brosnan, Jenny Wright, Geoffrey Lewis. Screenplay Leonard, Gimel Everett. 108 mins. Colour.The full title is Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, but the film has been repudiated by KING, angry at the cynicism whereby his old (1975) short story was purchased to exploit the marketing power of his name and then effectively discarded through being altered out of recognition. In this dumb rewrite of both FRANKENSTEIN (1931) and CHARLY (1968), an obsessive SCIENTIST (Brosnan) uses a VIRTUAL-REALITY hook-up, along with intelligence-raising drugs, to change the local handyman (Fahey), an affable simpleton, into a homicidal SUPERMAN with telekinetic powers who ultimately downloads himself into the USA's information networks in order to "cleanse this diseased planet". The film's concepts and dialogue are uniformly contemptible - noting in awe that his creation has learned Latin in two hours, the brilliant scientist says: "It took me a year just to learn the Latin alphabet!" The virtual-reality effects on which the film relies (the suggestion being that computer-generated scenery makes you clever) are not remotely like reality, and are routine in execution. [PN] LAWRENCE Lawrence Sterne STEVENS. LAWRENCE, HENRY L(IONEL) (1908- ) UK writer whose The Children of Light (1960) deals with the effects of radiation. It was used as the basis for a 1961 film, The DAMNED . [JC/PN] LAWRENCE, J(UDITH) A(NN) (? - ) US writer and artist, long resident in Greece, married to James BLISH from 1964 until his death in 1975, collaborating with him (sometimes without credit) on some of the later ties he wrote for the STAR TREK enterprise. She was credited as co-author of Star Trek 12 * (coll 1977 US) and was solely responsible for Mudd's Angels * (1978 US). [JC]See also: MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE; NEBULA. LAWRENCE, JIM Working name of US writer James Duncan Lawrence (1918- ), whose sf consists of the unremarkable Man from Planet X sequence - The Man from Planet X #1: She-Beast (1975) and #2: Tiger by the Tale (1975), both as by Hunter Adams - and 2 novels tied to SHARED-WORLD franchises: ESP McGee and the Haunted Mansion * (1983 chap) for the ESP McGee series, and The Cutlass Clue * (1986) for the A.I. Gang series. [JC] LAWRENCE, LOUISE Pseudonym of Elizabeth Rhoda Wintle (1943- ), UK writer who began publishing sf for young adults with Andra (1971), and who early became noted for the marked and sensitive intelligence of her settings and characters. The Power of Stars (1972), in which an extraterrestrial force transfixes human teenagers, and Star Lord (1978; rev 1987), in which a boy protects the eponymous alien from the government, are characteristic; as are The Wyndcliffe (1974) and its sequel, Sing and Scatter Daisies (1977), an intricate romance fantasy. Her shorter work is assembled in Extinction is Forever and Other Stories (coll 1990). [JC]Other works: The Earth Witch (1981); Calling B for Butterfly (1982); Children of the Dust (1985); Moonwind (1986); The Warriors of Taan (1986); Ben-Harran's Castle (1992; vt Keeper of the Universe 1993 US); The Dispossessed (1994 UK; vt The Patchwork People 1994 US).See also: STARS. LAWRENCE, STEPHEN Lawrence Sterne STEVENS. LAZARUS, HENRY (? -? ) UK writer, active in the 1890s, whose The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century: A Prospective History (1894), caused some stir through its advocacy of a welfare state following a revolution led by the forces of Labour. [JC] LAZENBY, NORMAN A(USTIN) (1914- ) UK pulp writer, prolific as an author of Westerns and detective novels, and a minor contributor to GENRE SF. He began publishing sf with "A Matter of Size" for Fantasy in 1946, and continued to publish stories under various names for several years, and then again for a few years after 1970. The Coming of the Beetle Men (coll 1949 chap; the cover title was Terror Trap) contains 1 sf story. His only sf novel is The Brains of Helle (fixup 1953) as by Bengo Mistral. [SH] LEA, HOMER (1876-1912) US writer in whose "Yellow Peril" tale, The Valor of Ignorance (1909), a racially contaminated USA - riddled also with FEMINISTS-must attempt to gird its loins against a Japanese INVASION. But Japan wins, gaining California and other Pacific regions. In 1942, the book enjoyed the unusual privilege of being reprinted in both Japan and the USA. [JC] LEACOCK, STEPHEN (BUTLER) (1869-1944) Canadian economist and writer of many books of humorous sketches, the most famous being perhaps Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (coll 1912). Sf often featured as the target of the more fantastical of these sketches, beginning with spoofs like "The Man in Asbestos", which parodies H.G. WELLS's THE TIME MACHINE, and other stories in Nonsense Novels (coll 1911 UK). The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, with Other Such Futurities: A Book of Little Sketches of To-day and Tomorrow (coll 1929 US) and Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time (coll 1932 US) contain the highest proportion of this sort of material - UTOPIAS being a favourite target-but examples can be found in many of his collections. [JC]Other works: Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (coll 1917 UK); Frenzied Fiction (coll 1918 UK); The Hohenzollerns in America, With the Bolsheviks in Berlin, and Other Impossibilities (coll 1919 UK); Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels (coll 1920 UK).See also: CANADA. LEAHY, JOHN MARTIN (1886-1967) US PULP-MAGAZINE author and illustrator who contributed sf to Science and Invention and Weird Tales, in which latter appeared Drome (1927; 1952), a LOST-WORLD tale set in caves under California. [JE/EFB] LEBAR, JOHN Harold Bell WRIGHT. LeBARON, ANTHONY Keith LAUMER. LeCALE, ERROL Wilfred Glassford MCNEILLY. Le CLEZIO, J(EAN)-M(ARIE) G(USTAVE) (1940- ) Mauritius-born French writer, known primarily for his work outside the sf field; he took his degree in literature at Nice University. He is a major contemporary author in the ABSURDIST tradition, his work often bordering on sf and the surreal through a minute examination of physical phenomena and aspects of reality. His hallucinatory scrutiny of manifestations of madness in the world at large is best demonstrated in Les geants (1973; trans Simon Watson-Taylor as The Giants 1975 US), set in Hyperbolis, a nightmare shopping complex in a futuristic city. [MJ]Other works include: Le proces-verbal (1963; trans Daphne Woodward as The Interrogation 1964 US); La fievre (coll 1964; trans Daphne Woodward as Fever 1966 US); Le deluge (1965; trans Peter Green as The Flood 1967 US); Terra Amata (1967; trans Barbara Bray 1969 US); Le livre des fuites (1969; trans Simon Watson-Taylor as The Book of Flights 1972 US); La guerre (1970; trans Simon Watson-Taylor as War 1973 US); Voyages de l'autre cote ["Journeys on the Other Side"] (1975).See also: MEDIA LANDSCAPE. LEE, DAVID David S. GARNETT. LEE, GENTRY (B.) (1942- ) US writer who held several important posts in NASA's deep-space exploration programme and was a screenwriter for Carl SAGAN's Cosmos tv series. His sf has been written exclusively in collaboration with Arthur C. CLARKE (whom see for details); at least initially, the senior partner provided outlines based on ideas generated by both writers, and then the books themselves were written by GL. Cradle (1988), the first and weakest, is a First-Contact drama exhibiting little of Clarke's economy or intensity. Following on from Clarke's solo RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA (1973), the Rama sequence - Rama II (1989 UK),The Garden of Rama (1991) and Rama Revealed (1993) - shows a continual improvement. GL has proved competent at conveying technical information, though tending to lapse into an "airport novel" approach when it comes to dealing with human beings. [NT] LEE, MATT [s] Sam MERWIN. LEE, ROBERT [s] Paul W. FAIRMAN. LEE, SHARON [r] Steve MILLER. LEE, STAN (1922- ) US COMIC-book writer and executive, born Stanley Leiber; his name has been legally changed to Lee. Before WWII he began to establish himself in the New York comics publishing world, in 1939 joining Timely Comics, Inc., the firm for which Jack KIRBY invented Captain America. SL remained with Timely - which soon became Atlas Comics, then MARVEL COMICS in 1963, without changing its corporate identity - for the whole of his career, serving as its editor 1942-72, and as its publisher and editorial director from 1972, concentrating on film productions after 1978. His career was not of particular importance for the student of sf until 1961, when - with Kirby, who had spent many years away from Marvel - he began to create a new type of comic-book SUPERHERO, with titles like The Fantastic Four (from 1961) and The Incredible Hulk (from 1962); other comics created at this time included Spiderman (initiated in Amazing Fantasy in 1962) as drawn by Steve Ditko, whose angular, repressed style greyly evoked the pedestrian urban life which the hero tried to transcend. Over the next half decade SL (usually with Kirby) initiated a number of similar comic books including The Avengers (from 1963), into which Kirby reintroduced his Captain America, X-MEN (from 1963) and Thor (separate comic from 1966, character introduced in Journey into Mystery in 1962).These comics, most of them scripted by SL-according to the "Marvel Method", which involved much initial collaboration between artist and writer-were remarkable for eschewing the template structures of previous work in the field (characters neither ageing nor suffering significant change). SL's protagonists grew up, aged, suffered, exhibited human frailties and changed their minds about things; their superpowers were often explicitly seen as compensatory wish-fulfilments, allowing them - though never permanently - to transcend their personal problems. In hindsight, SL's 1960s work was a major influence on the creation of the GRAPHIC NOVEL in the 1980s, especially perhaps the work from about 1965 on, when his continuing storylines began to develop space-operatic complexities; most memorable were those episodes of The Fantastic Four in which the heroes became involved in intergalactic disputes with the planet-devouring (but rather sympathetic) Galactus and his moody sidekick, the Silver Surfer, a nonhuman rider of space imprisoned by Galactus within Earth's atmosphere where, misunderstood and reviled, he time and again (as featured in The Silver Surfer 1968-70) saved humanity from itself.The above account should be read in the context of Jack Kirby's repeated claims during the 1980s that SL was an administrator rather than a writer - indeed, that he actually wrote none of the comics for which he received writing credit. The editors of this encyclopedia are not in a position to evaluate those claims.In 1970 Kirby left Marvel; though he would return later, it is arguable that SL's domination of the comic-book world, as both editor and writer, began to slip from about this time. For instance, it was Roy Thomas who fruitfully introduced into Marvel's generic mix a number of themes and characters from HEROIC FANTASY (including Robert E. HOWARD's Conan in Conan the Barbarian from 1970), and though Marvel Comics featured ever more spectacular and sf-like situations, there was a sense of decreasing ebullience; routine situations began to predominate.SL is not to be confused with the Stan Lee who has written novels such as The God Project (1990), a NEAR-FUTURE thriller with metaphysical import. [JC] See also: SUPERMAN. LEE, TANITH (1947- ) UK writer, first of fantasies for children, beginning with The Dragon Hoard (1971), and then, after The Birthgrave (1975 US), primarily of fantasies for adults. Both these areas of concentration lie outside our proper remit, but it can be said that she is an inventive and fertile writer, that she has encompassed her primary theme - the ethical and sexual initiation of an adolescent character into a volatile world s/he herself will shape, often through renunciation - in a wide variety of modes, and that, although her work differs vastly in tone and subject matter from that of C.J. CHERRYH, both writers share a daunting comprehensiveness. TL, however, has not (yet) assembled her various singletons and series into one shared universe.The Birthgrave and its sequels, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978 US; vt Shadowfire 1978 UK) and Quest for the White Witch (1978 US), are sf by virtue of the ending of the first volume, in which Earthmen arrive in a spaceship to tell the albino heroine the true, non-supernatural explanation for the compulsions she feels and the voices she hears inside her head - and, having awoken with amnesia in the heart of a volcano and wreaked considerable damage upon the world with her untutored powers, she is by this time sorely in need of some reassurance. The second and third volumes deal primarily with her son, who must deal with his own powers and learn that his mother is not evil. At trilogy's end, immortal and forgiving, they commit incest. Don't Bite the Sun (1976 US) and Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977 US), both assembled as Drinking Sapphire Wine (omni 1979), form a genuine sf sequence set in a FAR-FUTURE world somewhat resembling that in Michael MOORCOCK's Dancers at the End of Time series, treated in this case as a DYSTOPIA whose citizens, superficially free to shape-change and cavort, are in fact prisoners of the protectiveness of their artificial environment. Electric Forest (1979 US) depicts the rite of passage of an ugly child on a planet where her appearance is shocking. Day by Night (1980 US) is set on non-rotating mirror-worlds unconscious of each other's existence. Sabella, or The Blood Stone (1980 US) and its sequel, Kill the Dead (1980 US) - both assembled as Sometimes, After Sunset (omni 1980 US) - associate vampirism with Mars. The Silver Metal Lover (1981 US) concerns a love affair between a woman and a ROBOT or ANDROID. Days of Grass (1985 US) is set a century or so after an ALIEN invasion. TL's sf, though she is clearly conversant with its instruments, makes such individual use of the normal displacements of the genre that nothing - from robots to cosmogony - fails to serve her primary impulses as a storyteller. For TL, sf is a kind of metaphysical pathos: it illustrates her children.Of her several volumes of stories, some of which are exceptional, the most far-ranging are probably Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction (coll 1986 US), Forests of the Night (coll 1989) and Women as Demons: The Male Perception of Women through Space and Time (coll 1989). [JC]Other works:Juvenile fantasies: Princess Hynchatti and Some Other Surprises (coll 1972); Animal Castle (1972); Companions on the Road (1975) and The Winter Players (1976), both assembled as Companions on the Road and The Winter Players: Two Novellas (omni 1977 US); East of Midnight (1977); The Castle of Dark (1978); Shon the Taken (1979); Prince on a White Horse (1982), assembled with The Castle of Dark as Dark Castle, White Horse (omni 1986 US).Adult fantasies: The Betrothed (1968 chap); Volkhavaar (1977 US); the Tales from the Flat Earth sequence, comprising Night's Master (1978 US), Death's Master (1979 US) and Delusion's Master (1981 US), all assembled as Tales from the Flat Earth: The Lords of Darkness (omni 1987 US), plus Delirium's Mistress: A Novel of the Flat Earth (1986 US) and Night's Sorceries (coll 1987 US), both assembled as Tales from the Flat Earth: Night's Daughter (omni 1987 US); the Wars of Vis sequence, comprising The Storm Lord (1976 US) and Anackire (1983 US), both assembled as The Wars of Vis (omni 1984 US), plus The White Serpent (1988 US); Lycanthia, or The Children of Wolves 1981 US); Unsilent Night (coll 1981 chap US); Cyrion (coll of linked stories 1982 US); Sung in Shadow (1983 US); Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer (coll 1983 US); The Beautiful Biting Machine (1984 chap); USTamastara, or The Indian Nights (coll 1984 US); The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales (coll 1985 US); Madame Two Swords (1988 US); A Heroine of the World (1989 US); the Secret Book of Paradys sequence, comprising The Book of the Damned (coll of linked stories 1988) and The Book of the Beast (1988), both assembled as The Secret Book of Paradys (omni 1991 US), plus The Book of the Dead (coll 1991 US) and The Book of the Made (coll 1993 US), both assembled as The Secret Books of Paradys III & IV (omni 1993); The Blood of Roses (1990 ); Black Unicorn (1991 US) and its sequel, Gold Unicorn (1994); Into Gold (1986 IASFM; 1991 chap); the Blood Opera sequence, comprisingDark Dance (1992)Personal Darkness (1993) and Darkness, I (1994), with further volumes projected; Heart-Beast (1992), a werewolf novel; Elephantasm (1993); Nightshades: Thirteen Journeys into Shadow (coll 1993); Eva Fairdeath (1994).See also: CHILDREN'S SF; DAW BOOKS; FEMINISM; RADIO; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. LEE, THOMAS (? -? ) UK writer, active in the late 19th century, identified by Darko SUVIN in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK (1983) as a North London plasterer and publican. TL's sf novel, Falsivir's Travels: The Remarkable Adventures of John Falsivir, Seaman, at the North Pole and in the Interior of the Earth (1886), is a HOLLOW-EARTH tale. The narrator discovers a race of giants oppressed by a race of normal-sized humans, along with other features that E.F. BLEILER has suggested mark the author's attempts to satirize the UK of the 19th century. [JC] LEE, WALT(ER WILLIAM) (1931- ) US film-writer and consultant with a 1954 BS in physics. His monumental self-published Reference Guide to Fantastic Films: Volume 1 A-F (1972), Volume 2 G-O (1973) and Volume 3 P-Z (1974) contains upwards of 20,000 entries. Fantasy, occult and horror films feature more largely than pure sf, but the latter is dealt with thoroughly. The work remains a useful research tool for anyone dealing with sf CINEMA, although commentary on the actual content of the films it covers is very minimal. He later collaborated with Richard DELAP on an sf horror novel about a shape-changing ALIEN, Shapes (1987). [PN] LEE, WILLIAM William S. BURROUGHS. LEESON, ROBERT (ARTHUR) (1928- ) UK editor and writer, active from the mid-1940s. He began publishing his books for children, in which he has since specialized, with Beyond the Dragon Prow (1973), an historical romance. Of sf interest is the Time Rope sequence - Time Rope (1986), Three Against the World (1986), The Metro Gangs Attack (1986) and At War with Tomorrow (1986) - in which a sharp social awareness of the contemporary world is focused through a TIME-TRAVEL plot with ample conflicts; and the Zarnia Experiment sequence - comprising Landing in Cloud Valley (1991; vt The Zarnia Experiment: Phase 1: Landing 1993), Fire on the Cloud (1991; vt The Zarnia Experiment: Phase 2: Fire! 1993), The Zarnia Experiment: Phase 3: Deadline (1993), #4: Danger Trail (1993), #5: Hide and Seek (1993) and #6: Blast Off! (1993). [JC]Other works: The Third Class Genie (1975); Slambash Wangs of a Compo Gormer (1987); Landing in Cloud Valley (1991), which begins the projected Cloud Valley sequence. LEE TUNG (? - ) Indian writer whose interesting sf novel, The Wind Obeys Lama Toru (1967), is a complex story about OVERPOPULATION in which fertility and sterility drugs act and counteract, driving the population up and down disastrously. [JC] LEFANU, SARAH (1953- ) UK academic whose Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (anth 1985), ed with Jen Green (1954- ), provided a forum for WOMEN SF WRITERS. The FEMINISM illustrated in that book could serve readers as a backdrop for In the Chinks of the World Machine (1988; vt Feminism and Science Fiction 1989 US), a solid nonfiction analysis of the work of several contemporary sf writers, most notably Suzy McKee CHARNAS, Ursula K. LE GUIN, Joanna RUSS and James TIPTREE Jr. Through readings of some acuteness, SL argues that GENRE SF has provided a conceptual opportunity for women writers to speak in their own autonomous voices, unimprisoned by the patriarchal modes dominant in more "normal" literatures. [JC] LEGER, RAYMOND [r] Raymond MACDONALD. LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES COMIC-book series about a group of superpowered youths in the 30th century, published by DC COMICS. The LOS-H first appeared in Adventure Comics #247 (April 1958) in a Superboy story written by Otto Binder ( Eando BINDER) and then featured in various SUPERMAN titles (ed Mort WEISINGER) before gaining their own series in Adventure Comics #300. Writers have included Jerry SIEGEL, Edmond HAMILTON, Paul Levitz and Jim Shooter, whose first story appeared when he was only 13, a logical extension of Weisinger's policy of incorporating reader suggestions. Many LOS-H characters were designed by fans, and its leadership was regularly decided by readers' votes. LOS-H appeared in Adventure Comics #300-#380 (Sep 1962-May 1969), then in Action Comics #378-#392 (July 1969-Sep 1970); it then became a regular back-up feature in Superboy, appearing Mar 1971-Aug 1977 in #172-#173, #176, #183-#184, #188, #190-#191, #193, #195 and #197-#230. At this point there was a title change. Superboy became Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes from #231 (Sep 1977), and this became just Legion of Super-Heroes for #259-#313 (Jan 1980-July 1984). Then there began a new "deluxe" series, produced on higher-quality stock; also called Legion of Super-Heroes, it ran from #1 to #63 (July 1984-Aug 1989). The older title of the same name was from #314 renamed Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, featuring new material to #325 (July 1985) and thereafter reprinting the "deluxe" title on a one-year-behind schedule. A new series, again called Legion of Super-Heroes, began with #1 (Nov 1989) 3 months after the last issue of the old, and (1991) is current. The present writers are Tom and Mary Bierbaum.Much of LOS-H's sf content was quaint even when it first appeared, but sf continues as an important and evolving part of the series, even if in uneasy balance with its SUPERHERO basis. [ZB/BF] LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER) (1929- ) US writer, based in Portland, Oregon. Her first novel was published in 1966; by 1970 she was spoken of as one of the most important writers within the field. Her reputation has extended far beyond the readership of GENRE SF, while within the genre she has been honoured with 5 HUGOS and 4 NEBULAS; more attention has been paid to her by the academic community than to any other modern sf writer.UKLG is the daughter of Dr Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, the former a celebrated anthropologist who has published much work on Native Americans, the latter a writer best known for Ishi in Two Worlds (1961). UKLG was thus brought up in academic surroundings; her own education, with an undergraduate degree from Radcliffe and a master's degree from Columbia, was in Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, particularly French. She wrote POETRY (some of it collected in Wild Angels [coll 1975 chap]) and a number of unpublished realistic novels, mostly set in an imaginary Central European country, before turning to sf. (It is generally assumed that her two Orsinia books, both set in 19th-century "Orsinia", Orsinian Tales [coll of linked stories 1976] and Malafrena [1979] - neither sf or fantasy - are reworkings of this 1950s Central European material.) Typically, UKLG's tales set a man in an alien (and perhaps alienated) world, and follow him on a quest, until he makes a CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH and proves an agent for the reconciliation of the sundered parts; the quest often takes the form of a winter journey.All her early published genre stories were bought by Cele GOLDSMITH for AMZ and Fantastic, her first published genre piece being "April in Paris" for Fantastic in 1962; like much of her early work this is more FANTASY than sf, though she makes no rigorous distinction between the two, as she notes in "A Citizen of Mondath" (1973) and other essays in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (coll 1979; rev with biblio omitted 1989 UK) ed Susan WOOD.Much of UKLG's earlier work, generally known as the Hainish series, is set in a common universe. The people from the planet Hain once seeded the habitable worlds of our part of the Galaxy with human life; this has resulted in great cultural variety, useful for a writer who grew up with ANTHROPOLOGY as an everyday discipline. Five novels, two novellas and several short stories belong to the sequence, which covers about 2500 years of future HISTORY, beginning 300-400 years from now.UKLG's first three novels come late in the sequence's internal chronology. They are Rocannon's World (1966 dos; text corrected 1977), Planet of Exile (1966 dos) and City of Illusions (1967), and were collected as Three Hainish Novels (omni 1978). In Rocannon's World an ethnographer is marooned on a primitive planet with which he comes to terms only with difficulty; finally, in giving himself to the planet, he receives in return the gift of "mindspeech" or telepathy ( ESP). Planet of Exile, set over 1000 years later, has mindspeech in normal use; a Terran colony is struggling to survive on a planet whose natives they despise; under pressure the two communities are finally able to merge. City of Illusions is set on a cowed Earth ruled by the human-seeming but alien Shing invaders who have the hitherto unknown art of "mindlying". The amnesiac hero turns out, when his memory is restored, to be a messenger from the planet of the previous book; able to detect mindlying, he will be the agent of destruction for the malign Shing.Perhaps the generic structures of these books are too conventional to sustain fully the weight of meaning they are required to bear. But, though apprentice work, all show, well developed, the typical UKLG strategy of shaping a story around recurrent motifs, which gain in richness and density as the action juxtaposes them in new patterns, until it might almost be said that the motifs are the story. Many of these are the simple archetypal symbols that have always dominated myth and poetry: darkness and light, root and branch, winter and spring, submission and arrogance, language and silence. These are not seen by UKLG as polarities or opposed forces; rather, they are twin parts of a balanced whole, each deriving meaning from the other. UKLG's dualism, insofar as it exists, is not so much in the Western philosophical tradition (where progress is often seen to derive from the tension of antitheses, as in Marxist dialectics) as in the Eastern Taoist tradition, where the emphasis is on balance, mutuality (as in yin and yang) and an ordered wholeness. However, while Jungian archetype and the tenets of Taoism play a central role in all UKLG's work, critical commentaries on UKLG have emphasized them almost too much; they are by no means the whole story.The first work of UKLG's maturity as a writer is THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), which won both Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel. The story is told in a prose notable for its clarity and evocative precision. Once again an ethnologist visits a planet, this time Gethen, whose people are androgynous; normally neuter, they have the capability of becoming either male or female at the peak of their sexual cycle; the world itself is snow-bound. The professional observer cannot hold aloof from events; in the novel's most moving sequence, a long, lonely journey across the ice, he reaches a painful understanding with, and a reciprocated love for, the Gethenian protagonist. Because the Gethenians appear initially to be like us, the reading experience - a gradual understanding of the differences between Gethenians and us - invites thoughtfulness about the nature of SEX and sexism in our world, and of cultural chauvinism generally. These four Hainish novels were reprinted along with "The Word for World is Forest" (see below) as Five Complete Novels (omni 1985).The next two important items in the Hainish sequence are novellas: "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) and THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972 in Again, Dangerous Visions ed Harlan ELLISON; 1976). The former story, its title taken from Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress", is set just after the action of Rocannon's World, and the latter, which won a 1973 Hugo as Best Novella, rather earlier. Both set humans on alien planets; the first ( LIVING WORLDS) is inhabited by only a sentient plant network (the previous line of the Marvell poem is "My vegetable love should grow"); the second planet is occupied by a much-exploited native race, in a situation clearly made to articulate parallels with the Vietnam War. In both cases a kind of union is gained through human surrender to otherness, and alienation is imaged as violence, madness and ravening egoism. UKLG's stories are remarkably persuasive and consistent in their outlook, although the answers tend to come less easily in the work of her middle period, whose major work was the fifth and last novel in the Hainish sequence.This was THE DISPOSSESSED: AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA (1974), which won a Hugo and a Nebula, and is widely regarded as UKLG's most richly textured sf work. This is not a book in which difficulties are readily surmounted; a central image is the wall. The novel stands at the head of the Hainish sequence, for it tells the life of a physicist whose new MATHEMATICS (by another conceptual breakthrough) will result in the ANSIBLE, the instantaneous-communication device ( FASTER THAN LIGHT) necessary if the League of All Worlds - the galactic network about which the sequence is constructed - is to come into being. Two inhabited worlds, one a moon of the other, have different systems of POLITICS: one is an anarchy (reminiscent of that proposed in real life by Kropotkin), the other is primarily capitalist. The hero, Shevek, is not completely at home in either society. The book has been read as pitting a UTOPIA against a DYSTOPIA, but, as the book's subtitle implies, there are seldom absolutes in UKLG's work; the attractive anarchist society is in some ways blinkered and emotionally regimented (with the willing collaboration of its people). Ideationally the novel is very strong, but a slight didactic dryness in the telling-which, perhaps deliberately, hinders any simple emotional identification with the hero - alienated some readers. Nonetheless, it is a deeply imagined work of art. The short story "The Day before the Revolution" (1974) is an introduction to the anarchist society of The Dispossessed, being the tired, unromantic last memories of that society's founder; it, too, won a Nebula.One interesting non-Hainish novel was published before The Dispossessed. Set in the imaginative territory generally associated with Philip K. DICK, The Lathe of Heaven (1971) tells of a man who through his dreams can bring alternate reality structures into being. In its interest in METAPHYSICS, it is of a piece with her other work, including her fantasy (see below). It was intelligently dramatized for US tv as The LATHE OF HEAVEN .Through all this period (1962-74), UKLG also wrote non-Hainish fiction, including the Hugo-winning "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), a bitter, deft parable about the cost of the good life, and "Nine Lives" (1969), a moving story of CLONES mining an alien planet. With the exception of THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST, all UKLG's early short fiction can be found in THE WIND'S TWELVE QUARTERS (coll 1975; UK paperback in 2 vols), her first and best collection. UKLG has published fewer sf short stories since then. One of them, The New Atlantis (1975 as title story of The New Atlantis ed Robert SILVERBERG; 1989 chap dos), is a dark NEAR-FUTURE story, in which a ruined ECOLOGY is causing the USA (along with its frightened and frightening state apparatus) to sink into darkness just as ATLANTIS's white towers re-emerge above the sea; it ends ambiguously - as much of UKLG's later fiction does - with the cry of the Atlanteans: "We are here. Where have you gone?" This is one of the stories in UKLG's second collection, The Compass Rose (coll 1982), an occasionally whimsical book which had a mixed critical reception, as did the novella The Eye of the Heron (1978 in Millennial Women ed Virginia KIDD; 1982 UK), an over-diagrammatic political fable whose translucent simplicity approaches self-parody. Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1971-87 var mags; coll 1987) contains stories and poems about animals, many being previously collected, but featuring the first book appearance of "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?"; this Hugo-winning story recounts a human girl's meeting with incarnations of Native American spirit animals (including Coyote); it was later released as a graphic novel, Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight? (graph 1994). A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (coll 1994) continues to reflect UKLG's increasing absorption in tales which - while difficult to define generically - range comprehensively over the terrains of the fantastic.It became clear in UKLG's fiction after The Dispossesed (including the Orsinia sequence) that her strongly utopian impulse was taking over. This is unusual in postwar sf, whether genre sf or mainstream. Because utopian fiction tends not to be plot-driven, much of her fiction since 1974 has seemed a little static: it consciously demands a more contemplative kind of attention than that dictated by most sf. It is a difficult, quixotic demand, since it requires that the reader will accept a cultural re-education. The clearest example is the most recent and biggest of her sf novels, ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985). This is an experiment: a collage of verse, reports, tales, drawings by Margaret Chodos, an associated cassette of music by Todd Barton, and even recipes, all relating to the matriarchal society of the Kesh, who live in California's Napa Valley in a future long after some catastrophic event has sunk the coastal cities. An intermittent narrative tells of a woman who marries into, then flees from, a masculine, aggressive society. Utopia is here approached by way of a fictional anthropology, which focuses on its society not by asking the sf question, "How did it get that way?", but simply asking: "What is it?"UKLG's FANTASY stories may be her most personal work, and have given some of her readers more pleasure than anything she has written. The Earthsea trilogy, austere but vivid, is a major work whose appeal goes far beyond the teenagers at whom in the first instance it was aimed: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971) and The Farthest Shore (1972; slightly cut 1973 UK), collected as Earthsea (omni 1977; vt The Earthsea Trilogy 1979). Set on ISLANDS in an ocean world, the trilogy tells of training in a MAGIC so rigorous in its principles as to be easily understood as a form of alternate science. The books recount episodes in the apprenticeship, the full-powered maturity and the final death-quest of a magician, Ged. A grave joyfulness pervades the trilogy, which is perhaps more maturely thoughtful (while remaining exciting) than the comparable Narnia series of C.S. LEWIS. However, over the next decade a certain backlash against UKLG became evident from the women's movement. It was alleged that, especially in this trilogy, Le Guin saw men as the actors and doers in the world (magicians are male) while women remain the still centre, the well from which they drink. UKLG's FEMINISM certainly altered in nature over the next two decades (as evident in ALWAYS COMING HOME), and she also made a kind of restitution by writing a fourth novel in the Earthsea series: Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990). It is a sad, powerful, quiet book about the strength of women (and the ultimate impotence of Ged); it won a Nebula. Earthsea Revisioned (1992 lecture given as "Children, Men and Dragons"; 1993 chap) considers some issues raised within - and by - the sequence. UKLG has edited 4 anthologies: Nebula Award Stories 11 (anth 1976);Interfaces (anth 1980) and Edges (anth 1980), both with Virginia Kidd; and The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (anth 1993) with Brian Attebery, assisted by Karen Joy FOWLER. She also published a second collection of nonfiction pieces, mostly literary essays and reviews, Dancing at the End of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (coll 1989). In 1989 she received the PILGRIM AWARD for services to sf criticism.The limpid, serene clarity of her fables, whether in fantasy, sf or even the quasihistorical fiction of her Orsinia stories, is powerful, and has won her many loyal friends, even in the genre readership which some see her as having abandoned. Why else would this group continue to award her Hugos and Nebulas through to the end of the 1980s? It is possible that UKLG has been overpraised, but she has given much to the genre, not least by showing (through example) how the traditional novelist's interest in questions of character and moral growth need not be alien to sf. John CLUTE once wrote of her as "eminently sane, humanitarian, concerned" but went on to lament her "fatal lack of risk". This may be overstatement, but it points to a quality in her work that has been observed by other critics. It is true that UKLG's demure certainties could, perhaps, be more open to the random and the unpredictable. But can self-confidence justly be evidenced as a flaw? [PN]Other works: From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (1973 chap), a critical pamphlet; Dreams Must Explain Themselves (coll 1975 chap), a pamphlet which has a story, an essay, a speech and an interview; The Water is Wide (1976 chap); Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976; vt A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else 1976 UK), a contemporary love story, not sf, directed at teenagers; Walking in Cornwall: A Poem for the Solstice (1976 chap); Leese Webster (1979 chap), for children; The Beginning Place (1980; vt Threshold 1980 UK), a poignant fantasy novel for young adults about an ambiguously desirable alternate world; Gwilan's Harp (1977 Redbook; 1981 chap); Hard Words and Other Poems (coll 1981 chap); the Adventures in Kroy sequence for children, comprising The Adventures of Cobbler's Rune (1982 chap) and Solomon Leviathan's Nine Hundred and Thirty-First Trip around the World (1983 chap); In the Red Zone (1983 chap); The Visionary: The Life Story of Flicker of the Serpentine (1984 chap dos), a pre-published excerpt from ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985); King Dog: A Screenplay (1985 dos), based on Hindu myth; Wild Oats and Fireweed . . . New Poems (coll 1988 chap); A Visit from Dr Katz (1988 chap), for children; Catwings (1988 chap),Catwings Return (1989 chap) and Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings (1994 chap), all for children; Fire and Stone (1989 chap) with illustrator Laura Marshall, for children; Way of the Water's Going: Images of the Northern California Coastal Range (1989) with Ernest Waugh and Allan Nicholson, nature photographs printed with excerpts from ALWAYS COMING HOME; The Lathe of Heaven/The Dispossessed/The Wind's Twelve Quarters (omni 1991); The Eye of the Heron & The Word for World is Forest (omni 1991 UK); Searoad: The Chronicles of Klatsand (coll 1991), not sf/fantasy, 10 short stories set on the Oregon coast; Nine Lives (1969 Playboy; 1992 chap); Fish Soup (1992 chap); A Ride on the Red Mare's Back (1992 chap); Blue Moon over Thurman Street (1992 chap); Going Out with Peacocks and Other Poems (coll 1994 chap).About the author: SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, Nov 1975, is a Le Guin issue, concentrating on the sf; The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin (chap 1976) by George Edgar SLUSSER; Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1979) ed M.H. GREENBERG and J.D. OLANDER; Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space (anth 1979) ed Joe De Bolt; Ursula K. Le Guin (1984) by Charlotte Spivack; Ursula K. Le Guin (anth 1986) ed Harold Bloom, in which most notes and documentation from the original essays have been unaccountably dropped; Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (anth 1987) ed Bloom.See also: ACE BOOKS; AMAZING STORIES; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CHILDREN'S SF; CITIES; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; IMAGINARY SCIENCE; INVASION; LEISURE; LIBERTARIAN SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LINGUISTICS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MUSIC; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PASTORAL; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POETRY; SCIENCE FICTION FOUNDATION; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY; VIRTUAL REALITY; WOMEN SF WRITERS. LEHMANN, RUDOLF CHAMBERS (1856-1929) UK politician, lawyer and writer, involved in the journal Punch 1890-1919 and composing for initial publication there "Mr Punch's" Prize Novels (coll 1892), which includes parodies of H. Rider HAGGARD, Jules VERNE and the future- WAR subgenre. A later volume, The Adventures of Picklock Holes (coll 1901), contains at least 1 sf story in addition to its parodies of Arthur Conan DOYLE. [JC] LEHR, PAUL (1930- ) US illustrator. After graduation, PL studied illustration at the prestigious Pratt Institute, and sold his first sf painting to Satellite in 1958. Since then he has done hundreds of book-cover paintings as well as covers for ASF, Omni and non-sf magazines such as Saturday Evening Post, Life and Time. Over the 30-plus years PL has been involved with sf his art has become less realistic, and the greys that dominated his early work have been replaced by more vivid colours. His paintings often contain strange, egg-shaped objects, and sometimes his people seem insignificant and symbolic. With the increasing reliance on realism in sf ILLUSTRATION during the 1980s, PL's sf artwork became less in demand from publishers. [JG] LEHTIMAKI, KONRAD [r] FINLAND. LEIBER, FRITZ (REUTER Jr) (1910-1992) US writer, father of Justin LEIBER. FL majored in psychology and physiology at the University of Chicago, then spent a year at a theological seminary. His subsequent career included periods as an editor (chiefly with Science Digest) and as a drama teacher. He became interested in writing through voluminous correspondence with a college friend, Harry Fischer; it was Fischer who in 1934 suggested the characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, whose HEROIC-FANTASY adventures were central to FL's career. Both men worked intermittently on embellishments to the saga, as described in detail by FL in his essay "Fafhrd and Me" (included in The Second Book of Fritz Leiber coll 1975) and further discussed in Fafhrd & Me (coll 1991 chap); Fischer was important to FL as both a friend and an inspiration, and was the model for the Gray Mouser, FL viewing himself as Fafhrd. In 1939 "Two Sought Adventure", the first published story of the sequence and FL's first story, appeared in Unknown; he was still adding to the series half a century later. It comprises Swords and Deviltry (coll 1970), Two Sought Adventure (coll 1957; exp and rev vt Swords Against Death 1970) and Swords in the Mist (coll 1968) - all assembled as The Three Swords (omni 1989) - plus Swords Against Wizardry (coll 1968), The Swords of Lankhmar (1961 Fantastic as "Scylla's Daughter"; exp 1968) and Swords and Ice Magic (coll 1977; with 6 of the 8 stories cut vt Rime Isle 1977) - all assembled as Swords' Masters (omni 1990) - plus The Knight and Knave of Swords (coll 1988). From fairly prosaic beginnings the series developed into a complex and enjoyable cycle owing little to the standard cliches of its subgenre (for which FL is credited with coining the widely used description SWORD AND SORCERY). The mood varies from sombre introspection to broad comedy, and there is a very wide range of invention. On its original publication, the long story Ill Met in Lankhmar (1970 in Swords and Deviltry; 1990 dos) won both HUGO and NEBULA awards. The Swords of Lankhmar, which adds a strong element of sophisticated fetishistic sex to its other virtues - as does the book-length title story in The Knight and Knave of Swords-has strong claims to be considered the best modern HEROIC-FANTASY novel, as well as FL's own best novel.FL was noted also for his fantasies in modern settings, and was almost certainly the most influential model for the sudden creation in the 1980s of the subgenre of Contemporary (or Urban) Fantasy. FL's examples include: "Smoke Ghost" (1941); Conjure Wife (1943 Unknown; assembled in Witches Three, omni 1952, ed Fletcher PRATT; as a solo book 1953), a novel of 20th-century witchcraft which has twice been filmed - as Weird Woman (1944) and Burn, Witch, Burn (1961; vt Night of the Eagle) - as well as being adapted for tv; "The Man who Made Friends with Electricity" (1962); and Our Lady of Darkness (1977), a subtle and touching Gothic with strong autobiographical elements. Other fantasy tales include "Gonna Roll the Bones" (1967), published in DANGEROUS VISIONS, which won a Hugo and a Nebula and later appeared, with other tales of interest, in The Ghost Light (coll 1984); in it a compulsive gambler finds himself playing dice with the Devil, the stake being his soul. "Belsen Express" (1975) won both the Lovecraft Award and the August Derleth Award. FL's further awards for fantasy included the 1975 Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) Award and the 1976 Life Achievement Lovecraft Award; the 1981 Grand Master Nebula Award was presented for his work as a whole. He won altogether 6 Hugos (2 for novels), 4 Nebulas and about 20 other awards.FL's first important work of sf was GATHER, DARKNESS! (1943 ASF; 1950), in which a religious dictatorship ( RELIGION) is overthrown by rebels who disguise their superscience (colourfully, if by far-fetched logic) as witchcraft. Destiny Times Three (1945 ASF; 1957) is a neglected ALTERNATE-WORLDS variant. In the early 1950s he became a regular contributor to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, for which he wrote a number of notable stories, chiefly social SATIRE. Paramount among these is "Coming Attraction" (1950), depicting an unpleasantly decadent future USA. The Green Millennium (1953) shows some similar thematic concerns, particularly regarding sexual mores. He then fell silent for four years, through alcoholism (about which he was candid).His return to sf in 1958 was vigorous, his first stories introducing the Change War series, built around a TIME-PARADOX war being fought through time and space and ALTERNATE WORLDS by two factions, the "Spiders" and the "Snakes". The sequence comprises THE BIG TIME (1958 Gal; 1961 dos) along with most of The Mind Spider and Other Stories (coll 1961 dos; rev 1976), this material being variously reassembled as The Change War (coll of linked stories 1978; cut vt Changewar 1983). THE BIG TIME, which takes place entirely in one room (an R & R location called the Place, sited beyond normal realities) is suggestive of a play in prose form, and thus reflects FL's background in theatre; both his parents were Shakespearean actors and his father appeared in many films, and FL himself acted on both stage and screen, including a small part in the Greta Garbo film Camille (1936). THE BIG TIME won a Hugo as Best Novel, as did his most ambitious sf work, THE WANDERER (1964), a long DISASTER novel telling of the havoc caused by the arrival of a strange planet in the Solar System. Its mosaic narrative technique, through which events are observed through a multiplicity of viewpoints, foreshadowed the profusion of such novels and films in the 1970s. FL won a further Hugo for "Ship of Shadows" (1969), a novella first published in a special FL issue of FSF, and completed the double of Hugo and Nebula awards for the third time with "Catch that Zeppelin!" (1975), a vivid if inconclusive PARALLEL-WORLDS story. Selections of his best short fiction include THE BEST OF FRITZ LEIBER (coll 1974 UK), The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (coll 1976), The Ghost Light (noted above) and The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (coll 1990) ed Martin H. GREENBERG.Despite his many awards FL never quite established an identity as an sf writer in the way he had for his fantasy; for this reason his work has sometimes been undervalued. His work reflected his various enthusiasms - cats, chess and the theatre are all recurrent motifs - and beliefs, notably a distaste for sexual repression and hypocrisy; but the variety of his approaches was considerable. His prose is ebullient; its idiosyncrasies occasionally appear mannered, but its baroque and colourful qualities are usually prevented from becoming slapdash by the precision with which he used words, and by the appositeness of his imagery, at least in his fantasies. FL was never quite as comfortable in sf, where a straining for effect is more often noticeable. Many of his sf works, he revealed, were fantasies rewritten when the fantasy market began to contract. By refusing to create an easily recognizable template for his sf and then adhering to it, he may have sacrificed some popularity; in compensation, he was the only sf and fantasy writer of his generation to be still developing and producing his best work in the late 1970s. [MJE/JC]Other works: Night's Black Agents (coll 1947; cut vt Tales from Night's Black Agents 1961; original text with 2 stories added, exp 1978); The Sinful Ones (1950 Fantastic Adventures as "You're All Alone"; exp by other hands as title story of the Universal Giant Edition #5 anth 1953; cut vt as title story of You're All Alone coll 1972; text restored 1980); The Silver Eggheads (1958 FSF; exp 1962), an example of RECURSIVE SF; Shadows with Eyes (coll 1962); Ships to the Stars (coll 1964 dos); A Pail of Air (coll 1964); Tarzan and the Valley of Gold * (1966), one of only 2 Tarzan spin-offs ever authorized by the Edgar Rice BURROUGHS estate (the other being by Joan D. VINGE); The Night of the Wolf (coll 1966); The Secret Songs (coll 1968 UK); Night Monsters (coll 1969 chap dos; exp 1974 UK); A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969), discussed more fully under SPACE HABITATS; The Demons of the Upper Air (coll 1969 chap), poetry; The Book of Fritz Leiber (coll 1974); Heroes and Horrors (coll 1978); Sonnets to Jonquil and All (coll 1978 chap), poetry; Bazaar of the Bizarre (coll 1978); Ship of Shadows (coll 1979 UK), not to be confused with Ship of Shadows (1969 FSF; 1989 chap dos), which reprints only the title story; Ervool (1980 chap); The World Fantasy Awards 2 (anth 1980) with Stuart David Schiff; Riches & Power (1982 chap); The Mystery of the Japanese Clock (1982 chap), nonfiction; In the Beginning (1983 chap); Quicks around the Zodiac: A Farce (1983 chap); Conjure Wife/Our Lady of Darkness (omni 1991); 2 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser GRAPHIC-NOVEL versions by Howard V. CHAYKIN, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Book 1 (graph 1991) and Book 2 (graph coll 1991); Kreativity for Kats and Other Feline Fantasies (coll 1992).About the author: The special FL edition of FSF, July 1969; "The Profession of Science Fiction: XII: Mysterious Islands" by FL in FOUNDATION 11/12 (1977); Fritz Leiber (1980 chap) by Jeff Frane; Fritz Leiber (1983) by Tom Staicar; Fritz Leiber, Sardonic Swordsman: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1990) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE; Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber (1991) by Bruce Byfield.See also: ANTHOLOGIES; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; ARKHAM HOUSE; ARTS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; CITIES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DYSTOPIAS; END OF THE WORLD; FANTASY; FAR FUTURE; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENERATION STARSHIPS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GRAVITY; HITLER WINS; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; INVISIBILITY; LONGEVITY (INWRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); H.P. LOVECRAF T; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MUTANTS; ROBOTS; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TRANSPORTATION; UFOS; WAR. LEIBER, JUSTIN (FRITZ) (1938- ) US academic and writer, son of Fritz LEIBER. A Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, JL has used sf as a medium for speculation in his field of interest, the philosophy of the mind. His first novel, Beyond Rejection (1980), which begins the Beyond sequence, deals in considerable detail with the problems associated with transplanting the recorded mind of a man into the body of a woman (who has a prehensile tail). In Beyond Humanity (1987) JL constrasts human INTELLIGENCE with those of COMPUTERS and enhanced-intelligence chimpanzees ( APES AND CAVEMEN) as humans, computer and chimpanzee cooperate to contact extraterrestrial intelligence. The sequence concludes with Beyond Gravity (1988), set in 22nd-century Houston and Oxford. JL has also written a number of academic books on similar themes, including Can Animals and Machines Be Persons? (1985), which uses an sf scenario - a legal case between a space-exploration company and a Civil Liberties Union over whether a chimpanzee and a computer used on a space station should be treated as tools or as employees. [TA]Other works: The Saga of the House of Eigin sequence, comprising The Sword and the Eye (1984) and The Sword and the Tower (1985). LEIGH, STEPHEN (WALTER) (1951- ) US writer and musician who began publishing sf with "A Rain of Pebbles" for ASF in 1977, and who sometimes releases short stories as Lee Stevens. The first novel of his Neweden sequence - Slow Fall to Dawn (1981), Dance of the Hag (1983) and A Quiet of Stone (1984)-brought him into some prominence through its depiction of the attractive feudal culture obtaining upon the eponymous planet, whose name seemed, initially, only moderately ironic. Later episodes, however, demonstrate the fragility of Neweden mores in a SPACE-OPERA context that dissipates the network of mutual obligations that makes the thieves' guild at the sequence's heart so attractive a vehicle for sf adventures. Further sf novels of interest include: The Bones of God (1986), an interplanetary tale pitting a solitary prophet against the oppressive Judeo-Christian RELIGION that dominates Old Earth; Crystal Memory (1987), a complex novel in which problems typical of sf adventures - a female space-freighter pilot attempts to recover her erased memories and to avenge the death of her young son - are placed in a context featuring interestingly depicted MARS colonies, ALIEN incursions, zombies, intrigue and loss; and The Abraxis Marvel Circus (1990), a humorous fantasy, choked with variously comic characters and rock musicians, about reviving the dead. SL has written several ties in recent years, and his career has consequently lost some focus. [JC]Other works: Dr Bones #1: The Secret of the Lona * (1988); Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens #1: The Changeling * (1989); The Next Wave #2: Alien Tongue (1991), including an essay by Rudy RUCKER; volumes in the Byron PREISS package in which Ray BRADBURY"presents" a series of time-travel tales: Dinosaur World * (1992), Dinosaur Planet * (1993), Dinosaur Samurai * (1993) with John J.Miller, and Dinosaur Warriors *(1994). LEIGHTON, EDWARD G.J. BARRETT. LEINSTER, MURRAY Pseudonym under which US writer William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1896-1975) was best known in the sf field, and under which he wrote almost all his work in the genre; exceptions were a few stories in magazines, mainly those in the Bud Gregory series as by William Fitzgerald, and a small number as by Will F. Jenkins. He remained active as an sf writer from 1919, when his first story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", about a building falling backwards through time, was published in Argosy, until about 1970. Like most contributors to the pre-WWII US sf PULP MAGAZINES, he published a great deal of material that did not reach book form until after 1945. His first book publication, Murder Madness (1931), as its title indicates did not aim directly at the sf market (then still nascent in the USA), though the book is in fact sf. The Murder of the U.S.A. (1946; vt Destroy the U.S.A. 1950 Canada) as by Will F. Jenkins was again directed as much to the mystery as to the sf market, though its plot (the hero solves the mystery of who dropped 300 A-bombs on US cities) is more sf than locked-room. Because of the pile-up of magazine material, many of ML's post-WWII book publications contained or reworked early stories, and were often rather dated in plotline and character development; ironically, it was at this time that he was publishing his best work in the magazines, stories that competed on equal terms with those by writers 20 years newer to the field.ML's first series was the set of 4 off-beat Masters of Darkness or Preston-Hines superscience-blackmail stories contributed to The Argosy, 1929-30, and never collected in book form. The more widely known Bud Gregory series comprises the 3 stories in Out of this World (coll 1958) and "The Seven Temporary Moons" (1948); all 4 were originally published in TWS. Bud is a hillbilly whose intuitive knack with high technology allows him to solve various superscience problems. Of more interest is the Med Service sequence, S.O.S. from Three Worlds (coll 1967), The Mutant Weapon (1959 dos), Doctor to the Stars: Three Novelettes of the Interstellar Medical Service (coll 1964) and This World is Taboo (1961); all but Doctor to the Stars were assembled as The Med Series (omni 1983). In these stories and novels, Calhoun and the "being" Murgatroyd act as troubleshooters in various far-flung crises; the tales are robust and adventurous, but rudimentary compared to the inventiveness of James WHITE's Sector General tales (see also MEDICINE). The Joe Kenmore novels - Space Platform (1953), Space Tug (1953), and City on the Moon (1957) - make up a juvenile series about the crisis-ridden first years of the near-future US space effort, told in melodramatic terms that have not worn well.ML's best years as an sf writer were undoubtedly the decade following WWII, a period during which his finest short stories were published, among them "First Contact" (1945), "Doomsday Deferred" (1949) as by Jenkins, "The Lonely Planet" (1949), "If You Was a Moklin" (1951) and "Exploration Team" (1956), which won the 1956 HUGO for Best Novelette and became part of Colonial Survey (1955-6 ASF; fixup 1956; vt Planet Explorer 1957), perhaps his most enjoyable single volume, though his individual short stories are generally superior to his book-length work. When ML did contrive FIXUPS of short material, the result was often disappointing. His first classic story, for instance, "The Mad Planet" (1920), on being incorporated into The Forgotten Planet (1920-53 var mags; fixup 1954), exposed to view implausibilities that may have been tolerable in a 1920 short story but which, 30 years later in book form, failed to convince. His novels, which were frequently unambitious and repetitive, generally stretched beyond their proper span, and seemed written for a less demanding market than his best stories (which appeared in many journals, including ASF and Gal). A good selection of these tales can be found in Monsters and Such (coll 1959); The Best of Murray Leinster (coll 1976 UK) ed Brian Davis is much inferior to The Best of Murray Leinster (coll 1978) ed J.J. PIERCE.The last decade of ML's career boasted numerous publications, but no substantial works were conceived after the mid-1950s - though The Pirates of Zan (1959 dos), a competent but unremarkable space opera, won some praise. In this book, and in almost every full-length title ML published after WWII, the Galaxy serves as a template which scamps and engineers tinker with to their own advantage, and to the advantage of small communities on Earth or elsewhere. "According to the fiction tapes," as ML puts it in The Pirates of Zan, "the colonized worlds of the galaxy vary wildly from one another. In cold and unromantic fact, it isn't so. Space travel is too cheap and sol-type solar systems too numerous to justify the settlement of hostile worlds." It is perhaps revealing that variations, in this quote, are seen as innately hostile. In any case, the ML universe had little room for CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and the similarities in background from one novel to another were sufficiently numerous that his later books made up one loose series. Allied to this template view of the Universe was a deepening political simplicity of view, rather right-wing in orientation (a viewpoint common to many sf writers of his generation), which led to the frequent depiction of cartoon-like confrontations between the USA and underhanded enemies, in the resolving of which means tended to dominate ends. In Timeslip! * (1967) and The Time Tunnel * (1967), based on episodes from the tv series TIME TUNNEL - another ML novel, Time Tunnel (1964), is confusingly unrelated to this series - the past is paradoxically restructured by executive fiat to make life safe for democracy. But the paradox seems unconscious.The high and only superficially simple competence of the stories remains as ML's memorial. In this work he speaks with a directness to the heart of magazine sf and its readership with a craftsmanship and consistency that warrant the nickname he was given: the Dean of SF. [JC]Other works: Fight for Life (1947 Startling Stories; 1949); The Last Space Ship (1946-7 TWS; fixup 1949); Sidewise in Time (coll 1950); Conquest of the Stars 1952 (chap Australia); The Unknown (1952 chap Australia); The Black Galaxy (1949 Startling Stories; 1954); The Brain-Stealers (1947 Startling Stories as "The Man in the Iron Cap"; 1954 dos); Gateway to Elsewhere (1950 Fantasy Book; 1952 Startling Stories as "Journey to Barkut"; 1954 dos); Operation: Outer Space (1954); The Other Side of Here (1936 ASF as "The Incredible Invasion"; rev 1955 dos); War with the Gizmos (1958); Four from Planet 5 (1959); The Monster from Earth's End (1959); The Aliens (coll 1960); Men into Space * (1960), based on the tv series; Twists in Time (coll 1960); Creatures of the Abyss (1961; vt The Listeners 1969 UK); The Wailing Asteroid (1960); Operation Terror (1962); Talents, Incorporated (1962); The Duplicators (1964 dos); The Greks Bring Gifts (1964); Invaders of Space (1964); The Other Side of Nowhere (1964); Get Off my World! (coll 1966); Space Captain (1966 dos); Checkpoint Lambda (1966); Miners in the Sky (1967); Space Gypsies (1967); ties based on the tv series LAND OF THE GIANTS, comprising Land of the Giants * (1968), #2: The Hot Spot * (1969) and #3: Unknown Danger * (1969); A Murray Leinster Omnibus (omni 1968), assembling Operation Terror, Checkpoint Lambda and Invaders of Space; Last Murray Leinster Interview (1983 chap) with Ronald Payne.As Editor: Great Stories of Science Fiction (anth 1951).About the author: Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins): A Bibliography (1970 chap) by Mark OWINGS.See also: ALIENS; ALTERNATE WORLDS; AMAZING STORIES; ASTEROIDS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; COMMUNICATIONS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; FASTER THAN LIGHT; GREAT AND SMALL; HIVE-MINDS; INVASION; INVISIBILITY; LIVING WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MACHINES; MOON; OUTER PLANETS; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS; TIME PARADOXES; TIME TRAVEL. LEISURE The gradual AUTOMATION of industry and the progressive reduction of working hours has already extended the amount of leisure time which citizens of the developed nations have, and most contemporary images of the future assume that everyone will have even more of it in times to come. The majority of people, for whom work is a necessary but unpleasant burden, regard this as a highly desirable outcome; but sociologists and sf writers tend to be more sceptical. UTOPIAN satires like Muriel JAEGER's The Question Mark (1926) and Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) offer horrified and disapproving visions of the people of the future giving themselves over to frivolous and intellectually vacuous pursuits, all in the worst possible taste. Had Huxley lived to see contemporary tv, Torremolinos and Euro-Disney he would undoubtedly have said "I told you so", as he did with regard to far less garish spectacles in Brave New World Revisited (coll 1958). GENRE-SF writers, who are themselves part of the entertainment industry, might be expected to look upon leisure with a kinder eye, but for the most part they have not. E.M. FORSTER's censorious question about what happens when "The Machine Stops" (1909) is echoed even in such pulp melodramas as Miles J. BREUER's "Paradise and Iron" (1930) and Laurence MANNING's and Fletcher PRATT's strikingly vivid "The City of the Living Dead" (1930). Frederik POHL's and C.M. KORNBLUTH's biting SATIRE on consumerism, THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953), kicked off a whole series of similar sarcastic fantasies, notably Shepherd MEAD's The Big Ball of Wax (1954), Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (1955) and Harold LIVINGSTON's The Climacticon (1960). The most thoughtful and carefully focused of these was probably James E. GUNN's The Joy Makers (1954-5; fixup 1961), in which a cult of hedonism gradually takes over the world; it concludes with a vision more refined but every bit as striking as that in Manning's and Pratt's story, in which the vast majority of people live cocooned in life-support systems experiencing nothing but engineered dreams. Tomorrow's World (1956; vt Tomorrow and Tomorrow) by Hunt Collins (Evan HUNTER) is exceptional in defending the supporters of Vicarious Experience against their puritanically inclined opponents, and is one of the few sf stories to assume that the people of the future will sensibly accept the Epicurean dictum that pleasure, despite being the only true end of human experience, ought to be taken in moderation. Other images of technologically supported total escapism are featured in Arthur C. CLARKE's "The Lion of Comarre" (1949), John D. MACDONALD's "Spectator Sport" (1950), John T. SLADEK's "The Happy Breed" (1967) and Mack REYNOLDS's Perchance to Dream (1977) and After Utopia (1977). The majority opinion seems to be that such escapists need to be brought back to reality whether they like it or not, and that those appointed to achieve that end need not be overly scrupulous in so doing.The leisure pursuits traditionally associated with cultural elites inevitably get a better press in sf's images of the future than do those associated with the lower orders; comparison of the works considered in the entries on the ARTS and GAMES AND SPORTS will readily confirm this, but even stories about the finer arts often deal in images of enervated decadence, like those featured in J.G. BALLARD's stories of Vermilion Sands (coll 1971). A great many sf stories propose that sadistic spectator "sports" of the kind which went on in the Roman arena are likely to make a comeback in the future, their lapse into apparent obsolescence being a temporary imposition of censorship rather than a permanent refinement of feeling. Indeed, the current popularity of sf war games ( GAMES AND TOYS; GAME-WORLDS; VIRTUAL REALITY) has led to the production of TIES in which entire GALACTIC EMPIRES become writ-large arenas for carefully staged and extraordinarily bloody conflicts. Robert SHECKLEY's neatly satirical stories about sadistic futuristic games, including "Seventh Victim" (1953; filmed as La DECIMA VITTIMA [1965]) and "The Prize of Peril" (1958), were inflated by popular demand into the film-associated melodrama The Tenth Victim * (1966) and ultimately into the series of novels including Victim Prime (1987) and Hunter/Victim (1988), whose narrative dispiritedness might be seen as an ironic comment on the awful absurdity of their saleability. When they are not revisiting the past, sf images of future leisure tend to be firmly anchored in the trends of the present - as witness the recent rash of stories about the Theme Parks of the future, including the series begun by Larry NIVEN and Steven BARNES with Dream Park (1981) as well as Michael CRICHTON's JURASSIC PARK (1991). The extension of the MEDIA LANDSCAPE to take in mass-produced dreams, as featured in many stories - including Chelsea Quinn YARBRO's Hyacinths (1983) and James MORROW's The Continent of Lies (1984) - is seen by most writers as a natural extrapolation of the trend towards privacy and subjection to personal whim which led from cinema to tv to the VCR; and stories involving such technologies frequently echo - often calculatedly-contemporary disputes about the uses and alleged abuses of these media.The unfortunate correlates of leisure are, of course, boredom and purposelessness. The threat of boredom is seen by very many sf stories as something so likely to spoil the experience of IMMORTALITY as to make it almost worthless - a contention which is surely breathtaking in its closed-mindedness. Many sf stories similarly argue that, because the use of TECHNOLOGY to supply all our basic needs would rob our lives of a sense of purpose, we would be far better off engaged in a constant struggle for existence. HARD SF has characteristically adopted and adapted the frontier mythology of US history in order to extrapolate the struggle for existence onto a galactic stage, thus ducking the question of excessive leisure altogether, although on occasion hard-sf writers are inclined to take it for granted that time liberated from more vulgar forms of work will naturally be devoted, by all those capable of such intellectual effort, to scientific inquiry. (Indeed, many hard-sf writers seem unable to devise suitably sciencefictional leisure-time activities for their characters. In many books the protagonists seem to entertain themselves either by dabbling in quantum physics or by engaging in sex, with very little - such as reading thrillers or going to the movies - in between.) Aside from four-dimensional chess or a hobby of dabbling in xenoarchaeology, Sf novels which depict in some detail and without disapproval the leisure pursuits of imaginary cultures generally do so in connection with low-tech cultures whose leisure is both limited and evidently purposive; the works of Jack VANCE offer many examples, although the single most elaborate exercise in this vein is Ursula K. LE GUIN's ALWAYS COMING HOME (1985). It is arguable that one of the great failures of the sciencefictional imagination has been the inability to envision laudable ways in which the leisured classes of the future might make use of that leisure. Even stories which depict all-powerful immortals successfully keeping boredom at bay generally assume that their projects and methods will be essentially silly, like those of the central characters of Michael MOORCOCK's Dancers at the End of Time series (1972-7). Godlike beings in sf usually behave like spoiled children - although perhaps this is not entirely surprising, given that the gods people have actually believed in have mostly behaved in much the same fashion. Perhaps, on the other hand, the concept of "leisure" is implicitly ambiguous; if so, sciencefictional accounts of future leisure can do little else but unpack that ambiguity, exposing its paradoxicality for purposes of lamentation or mockery, according to taste. [BS/DP] LEITHAUSER, BRAD (1953- ) US poet and novelist whose sf novel, Hence (1989), is a near-future FABULATION - itself told as from a point considerably further into the future - in which a boy plays against a COMPUTER for the world chess championship. Style and matter are at times reminiscent of the work of Vladimir NABOKOV. [JC] LEM, STANISpsAW (1921- ) Polish writer, critic and polymath, winner of numerous awards including the 1973 Polish State Literary Award. Born in Lwow, he has described his childhood and adolescence charmingly in the autobiographical Wysoki zamek ["High Castle"] (1966 Poland). SL's study of medicine was interrupted in WWII by the Nazi occupation, when he worked as a car mechanic and welder; these experiences closely inform his first-written novel (not sf), Szpital Przemienienia (1957 Poland; trans William Brand as Hospital of the Transfiguration 1988 US). In 1946 he moved to Cracow, received his MD and wrote lyrical verse and essays on scientific methodology until he ran foul of the Soviet state's adulation of the Lamarckian biological theories of T.D. Lysenko (1898-1976) ( EVOLUTION; PSEUDO-SCIENCE), and was research assistant in a scientific institute. Another "naturalistic" novel, Czas nieutracony ["Time Saved"] (1955), depicts an intellectual finding his way from solitude to sociopolitical meaning; it likewise was written in the 1940s. In the meantime SL had switched to sf; he has published over two dozen books so far, with translations into at least 30 languages and several million copies sold. His early sf novels, Astronauci ["The Astronauts"] (1951 Poland) and Oblok Magellana ["The Magellan Nebula"] (1955 Poland), are works of a beginner and limited by some of the conventions of "socialist realism", but are still interesting and contain a number of SL's constant themes (the threat of global destruction and militarism; human identity); their UTOPIAN naivety is shaped by the committed humanism characteristic of one axis of his work. His other axis, a black grotesque, appears in Dzienniki Gwiazdowe (coll 1957 Poland; gradually exp until by 1971 there were 14 "voyages" and 8 other Ijon Tichy stories; trans in 2 vols, the second of which is an expansion rather than simply a continuation of the first: vol 1 trans Michael KANDEL as The Star Diaries 1976 US, vol 2 trans Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek as Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy 1982 US), which develops into a parable-like expression.The dozen years after the "Polish October" of 1956 were the golden noon of SL. He published 17 books: 5 sf novels; 10 partly overlapping books of sf short stories including the Pirx the Pilot cycle (see below), the "robotic fairy tales" of Bajki robotow (coll 1964 Poland) and the Trurl-Klapaucius or Cyberiad cycle (see below); Noc ksiezycowa (coll 1963 Poland), 1 sf play and 3 tv plays; nonfiction including the "cybernetic sociology" of Dialogi (1957 Poland); and the crown of SL's speculation and key to his fiction, Summa technologiae (1964 Poland), a breathtakingly brilliant and risky survey of possible social, informational, cybernetic, cosmogonic and biological engineering in Man's game with Nature.Eden (1959 Poland; trans Marc E. Heine as Eden 1989 US), SOLARIS (1961 Poland; trans Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox [from French trans] 1970 US), Niezwyciezony (1964 Poland; trans Wendayne Ackerman [from German trans] as The Invincible 1973 US) and Opowiesci o pilocie Pirxie (coll 1968 Poland; trans Louis Tribarne as Tales of Pirx the Pilot 1979 US and Louis Tribarne and Magdalena Majcherczyk as More Tales of Pirx the Pilot1982 US) use the mystery of strange beings, events and localities to educate their protagonists into understanding the limitations and strengths of humanity; SOLARIS was filmed as SOLARIS (1971). These parables for our age are fittingly open-ended: their tenor is that no closed reference system is viable in the age of CYBERNETICS and rival political absolutisms; the protagonists are redeemed by ethical and aesthetic insight rather than by hardware, abstract cognition or power - thence SL's strong, at times oversimplifying but salutary critique of English-language sf in his Fantastyka i futurologia (1970 Poland; excerpts trans with other material as coll Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy 1985 US) for abusing the potentials of the new in gimmicks and disguised fairytales. His critique of equally anthropomorphic banalities in Soviet sf was effected by means of his immense popularity and liberating influence there. In between the two leviathans, SL used the experience of Central European intellectuals ( ALBANIA, BULGARIA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, HUNGARY, POLAND, ROMANIA, RUSSIA, SOVIET UNION) to fuse a bright, humanistic hope with a bitter, historical warning. This double vision subverts both the "comic inferno" approach and a deterministic utopianism by juxtaposing the black flickerings of the former with the bright horizons of the latter. Such a style of wit places SL in the contes philosophiques tradition of Jonathan SWIFT and VOLTAIRE. Even his grotesque stories, where no "cruel miracles" redeem the often disgusting limits of Man - such as Cyberiada (coll 1965 Poland; trans Kandel as The Cyberiad 1974 US), collecting many of the Trurl-Klapaucius stories - are informed by such humanizing fun, black SATIRE or allegorical iconoclasm.Signs of an ideological dead-end, if not exhaustion, showed in about 1968, prompting further formal experimentation and a furious brilliance in SL's writing. In Glos pana (1968 Poland; trans Kandel as His Master's Voice 1983 US), SL's radical doubts about human self-determination and sovereignty, and therefore about possibilities of COMMUNICATION with other people (not to mention other civilizations), began threatening to distort the fictional form of the novel into solipsist musings, lectures and ideational adventure. His Master's Voice may have avoided that by a tour de force of narrative tone, but SL learned some lessons from this near-escape: he turned to a brilliantly innovative series of briefer second-order glosses at the borderland of fiction and treatise. Doskonala prozinia (coll 1971 Poland; trans Kandel as A Perfect Vacuum 1978 US) - mainly composed of reviews of nonexistent books, which simultaneously characterize and persiflage their targets - and Wielkosc urojona (coll 1973 Poland; trans Marc E. Heine with 2 pieces from Golem XIV [coll 1973] as Imaginary Magnitude 1984 US) range from thumbnail sketches of grisly futuristic follies to developments of Summa technologiae ideas on "intellectronics" (artificially heightened intelligence) and "phantomatics" (illusory existence). We find the latter in the most grimly hilarious and longest work of this period, a further Ijon Tichy story, " Ze Wspomnien Ijona Tichego: Kongres Futurologiczny""Kongres Futurologiczny" (in coll Bezsennosc 1971 Poland; trans Kandel as The Futurological Congress 1974 US), as well as SL's deeply rooted though atheistic theologico-cosmogonic obsessions. Only in the 1980s, with the awkward but ferocious assault upon human cognitive pretensions contained in Fiasko (1986 Poland; trans Kandel as Fiasco 1987 US), did he return to novel-length structures.SL's overflowing linguistic inventiveness, matching his controversial ideational plenty, is partly lost in translation, though the short stories assembled as Mortal Engines (coll trans 1977 US), The Cosmic Carnival of Stanislaw Lem (coll trans Kandel 1981) and One Human Minute (coll trans Catherine S. Leach 1986 US) reveal some of the exuberance of the writing. Nonetheless, SL's peculiar geopolitical vantage-point - enabling him effectively to transcend both cynical pragmatism and abstract utopianism - his stubborn warnings against static "final solutions", his position at the crossroads of major European cultures and ethics, joined to an intense internalization of problems from cybernetics and information theory, his fusion of dilemmas from ultramodern science and the oldest cosmogonic heresies, his dazzling formal virtuosity - all mark him as one of the most significant sf writers of our century, and a distinctive voice in world literature. [DS]Other works: Czlowiek z Marsa (1946 Poland, apparently only as episodes in a weekly); Sezam ["Sesame"] (coll 1955 Poland); Sledztwo (1959 Poland; trans Adele Milch as The Investigation 1974 US), ontological mystery rather than sf; Inwazja z Aldebarana ["Invasion from Aldebaran"] (coll 1959 Poland); Powrot s gwiazd (1961 Poland; trans Barbara Marszal and Frank Simpson as Return from the Stars 1980 US); Pamietnik znaleziony w wannie (1961 Poland; trans Michael Kandel and Christine Rose as Memoirs Found in a Bathtub 1973 US); Ksiega robotow ["The Book of Robots"] (coll 1961 Poland); Wejscie na orbite ["Getting into Orbit"] (coll 1962 Poland), essays on technology and fiction; Polowanie ["The Hunt"] (coll 1965 Poland); Ratujmy kosmos (coll 1966 Poland); Opowiadania (coll 1969 Poland); Rozprawy i szkice (coll 1974 Poland), essays on literature, sf and science; Katar (1977 Poland; trans anon as The Chain of Chance 1978 UK); Wisja Lokalna ["The Scene of the Crime"] (1982), an Ijon Tichy novel; Prowokacja ["Provocation"] (1984 Poland); Pokoj na Ziemi (1987 Poland; trans Elinor Ford with Michael Kandel as Peace on Earth 1994 US); Ciemnosc i plesn ["Darkness and Mildew"] (1988 Poland). About the author: "To My Readers" by Stanislaw Lem, Poland 5, 1973; "Language and Ethics in Solaris" by Edward Balcerzan, Science-Fiction Studies: Selected Essays on Science Fiction 1973-1975 (1976) ed R.D. MULLEN and Darko SUVIN; "Stanislaw Lem, Rationalist and Sensualist" by Jerzy Jarzebski, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES July 1977; "Lem in Review (June 2238)" by Michael KANDEL, Science-Fiction Studies Mar 1977; "Stanislaw Lem on Men and Robots" by Kandel, EXTRAPOLATION Dec 1972; New Worlds for Old (1974) by David KETTERER; "European SF" by Ursula K. LE GUIN, Science-Fiction Studies Spring 1974; "The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and SOLARIS" by Darko Suvin, afterword to SOLARIS (trans 1970) and rev for 1976 edn; Stanislaw Lem (1985) by Richard E. Ziegfeld; special SL issue of Science Fiction Studies (vol 13, part 3, whole #4, 1986).See also: ALIENS; ASTRONOMY; AUTOMATION; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; HUMOUR; ISLANDS; LIVING WORLDS; MACHINES; METAPHYSICS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; ROBOTS; SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA; SPACE HABITATS; SPACESHIPS; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. L'ENGLE, MADELEINE Working name of US actress and writer Madeleine L'Engle Camp (1918- ), whose first play, 18 Washington Square, South (1944), was produced in 1940, and who performed on the stage during the early 1940s. Her first novel, The Small Rain (1945), and some of its successors are non-genre fictions for adult audiences, but from And Both Were Young (1949) most of her work has been for children. She gained immediate and lasting acclaim for A WRINKLE IN TIME (1962), which was both her first sf novel and the first volume of the Meg Murray sequence, which includes also A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986) and An Acceptable Time (1989). A WRINKLE IN TIME, which won the 1963 Newbery Medal and various later awards, follows the adventures of the children of Dr Murray, a scientist abducted to a distant planet where he is held in thrall to a central COMPUTER intelligence. The tight plot and ample moral scope of the tale make Meg Murray's rescue of her father into one of the more memorable moments in CHILDREN'S SF. Later novels similarly expose the Murray family to adventures and stresses, and develop a telling portrait of complex young people. The Canon Tallis sequence - The Arm of the Starfish (1965) and The Young Unicorns (1968) - is also of interest. ML'E's singletons include Dance in the Desert (1969) and The Sphinx at Dawn (coll of linked stories 1982). [JC] LENGYEL, PETER [r] HUNGARY. LEONARD, FRANCOIS [r] BENELUX. LEONARD, GEORGE H. (1921- ) US writer whose two sf novels, Beyond Control (1975) and Alien (1977; vt Alien Quest 1981 UK), explore competently - but without much energy - the conventions of the sf-adventure tale; the latter is unconnected with the 1979 film of the same name. GHL is also the author of a classic work of PSEUDO-SCIENCE (or possibly spoof), Someone Else is on Our Moon (1976), which explains many features of the lunar landscape in terms of the mighty engineering feats of ALIEN colonists - and, inter alia, characterizes Galileo as a "feisty pioneer". [JC/JGr]See also: UFOS. LEOPARDI, GIACOMO [r] ITALY. LEOURIER, CHRISTIAN (1948- ) French writer, author of Les montagnes du soleil (1971; trans anon as The Mountains of the Sun 1973 US), an interesting socio-anthropological novel mapping the rediscovery of Earth after a cataclysmic deluge. CL has since written principally for children. [MJ] LE PAGE, RAND House name used by CURTIS WARREN for some routine SPACE OPERAS. Authors included William Henry Fleming BIRD, John S. GLASBY, Brian HOLLOWAY, Dennis HUGHES and David O'BRIEN. Beyond These Suns (1952) was by Cyril Protheroe. On the wrappers, RLP was described as "the French master of modern science fiction". [SH/JC] L'EPY, HELIOGENES de Pseudonym of an unidentified 17th-century UK writer whose A Voyage into Tartary, Containing a Curious Description of that Country (1689) depicts, perhaps for the first time, the discovery of a LOST WORLD. The circular city of Heliopolis in central Asia, inhabited by descendants of ancient Greeks, is a republican UTOPIA which maintains remarkable control over its own advanced technologies; a museum contains relics of flying machines and other devices. [JC]About the author: "L'Epy's A Voyage into Tartary. An Enlightenment Ideal Society" by E.F. BLEILER in Extrapolation (summer 1988) records Bleiler's pioneering investigation of this author and his text. LE QUEUX, WILLIAM (TUFNELL) (1864-1927) French-born UK journalist and author of over 100 books in a variety of genres, though most of his most popular works were espionage thrillers in the vein of E. Phillips OPPENHEIM - he claimed, unconvincingly, to be a spy himself - and detective novels, often with oriental colouring. He wrote a number of fantasies in the vein of H. Rider HAGGARD, with some immediate but no lasting success, and a number of romances, like Stolen Souls (1895), whose generic definition shifts between suspense and the occult. He is best remembered today for his two future- WAR/ INVASION novels: The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and The Invasion of 1910: With a Full Account of the Siege of London (1906; cut vt The Invasion 1910), the latter written with the anon collaboration of H(erbert) W(rigley) Wilson (1866-1940). Both books were serialized in English newspapers before being separately published, and both aroused considerable stir, particularly the latter, with its letter of commendation from the distinguished soldier and statesman Lord Roberts (1832-1914), who shared WLQ's anti-German views (and collaborated with him on two nonfiction dreadful-warning books, The Great War [1908] and Spies of the Kaiser [1909]). Though both novels were told with every trick WLQ had acquired in his years of journalism, and though the latter is replete with diagrams of the threatened invasion from Germany, the ultimate effect of each book is of a laboured turgidity of effect. A further tale whose title hints at similar contents, England's Peril (1899), is fundamentally an espionage thriller. WLQ persistently utilized Germany as the opponent in his work; even after WWI, stories like The Terror of the Air (1920) attempt to present a world in constant danger of Teutonic aggression. The sf of WLQ's last years is consistently routine. He is fundamentally a figure of pre-WWI interest. [JC]Other works: Zoraida: A Romance of the Harem and the Great Sahara (1895); The Great White Queen: A Tale of Treasure and Treason (1896); The Eye of Istar: A Romance of the Land of No Return (1897), one of several lost-race novels ( LOST WORLDS); A Madonna of the Music Halls (1897; vt A Secret Sin 1913); The Veiled Man (coll 1899); The Sign of the Seven Sins (1901); The Closed Book (1904); The Unknown Tomorrow: How the Rich Fared at the Hands of the Poor (1910); The House of Whispers (1910); The Great God Gold (1910); No 70 Berlin (1915); The Mystery of the Green Ray (1915); "Cinders" of Harley Street (coll 1916), featuring a doctor with PSI POWERS; The Zeppelin Destroyer: Being some Chapters of Secret History (1916); The Unbound Book (1916); The Bomb-Makers (1917); The Rainbow Mystery: Chronicles of a Colour-Criminologist (coll 1917); The Little Blue Goddess (1918); The Voice from the Void (1922); The Gay Triangle (1922), featuring a car with collapsible wings; Tracked by Wireless (1922); The Broadcast Mystery (1925); Double Nought (1927); The Chameleon (1927; vt Poison Shadows 1927 US); The Secret Formula (1928).See also: DYSTOPIAS; WEAPONS. LERANGIS, PETER (? - ) US writer of a variety of ties, including 3 titles in the Byron PREISS Time Machine sequence - The Amazing Ben Franklin * (1987 chap), The Last of the Dinosaurs * (1988) and Time Machine, Special Edition: World War II Code Breaker * (1989) - a STAR TREK novel, Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home * (1986 chap) ( STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME), and a Find Your Fate - G.I. Joe tale, The Sultan's Secret * (1988). [JC] LEROUX, GASTON (1868-1927) French writer of mystery novels who remains best known for Le Fantome de l'Opera (1910; trans Alexander Texeira de Mattos as The Phantom of the Opera 1911 UK), a tale of horror filmed in 1925 (rereleased with sound 1930), 1943, 1962, 1983 (for tv), 1989 and 1990 (for tv) and used as the basis for a highly successful 1986 musical. His first novel of direct genre interest, La Double Vie de Theophraste Longuet (1904; trans anon as The Double Life 1909 US; new trans Edgar JEPSON as The Man with the Black Feather 1912 UK), is a horror fantasy. Balaoo (1912; trans Alexander Texeira de Mattos 1913 UK) is an sf tale featuring a Missing Link in a detective role ( APES AND CAVEMEN). L'Espouse de Soleil (1913; trans anon as The Bride of the Sun1915 US) ventures into LOST-WORLD territory. Le Capitaine Hyx (1920; trans Hannaford Bennett as The Amazing Adventures of Carolus Herbert1922 US and its sequel The Veiled Prisoner (trans Hannaford Bennett 1923 UK), recount the exploits of a mysterious captain and his super-submarine in WWI. Le Machine a assassiner (1924; trans anon as The Machine to Kill 1935 US) features a ROBOT murderer. GL's use of sf material was opportunistic; a fair estimate of his skill as a novelist almost certainly awaits better translations. [JC]Other works:Le Fauteuil hante (1911; trans anon as The Haunted Chair1931 US); Le Coeur cambriole (coll 1922; trans Hannaford Bennett as The Burgled Heart1925 UK; vt The New Terror 1926 US), which includes some contes cruels;La Poupee Sanglante (1924; trans anon as The Kiss That Killed 1934 US). . LERTETH, OBEN [s] R.L. FANTHORPE. LESLIE, DESMOND (PETER ARTHUR) (1921- ) UK writer, son of Shane Leslie and best known for co-authoring with George Adamski (1891-1965) the famous UFO book Flying Saucers have Landed (1954; exp by Leslie 1970). Of sf interest is Angels Weep (1948), a right-wing DYSTOPIA, and The Amazing Mr Lutterworth (1958), in which ALIENS avert the destruction of the planet through a device which provides unlimited energy: a Time of Splendour ensues. [JC]Other work: How Britain Won the Space Race (1982) with Patrick MOORE, illustrated spoof account of a 19th-century UK space programme.See also: MUSIC. LESLIE, O.H. [s] Henry SLESAR. LESLIE, PETER (1922- ) UK author, journalist and actor, most of whose books have been borderline-sf ties contributed to tv spin-off series, beginning with 2 titles for the INVADERS sequence: #3: The Night of the Trilobites * (1968) and #4: The Autumn Accelerator * (1969). His tales for the MAN FROM U.N.C. L.E. series included: The Finger in the Sky Affair * (1966), which is #5 in the UK and #23 in the US numbering; The Radioactive Camel Affair * (1966), #7 UK and #7 US; The Diving Dames Affair * (1967), #10 UK and #9 US; The Splintered Sunglasses Affair * (1968), #14 UK and #16 US; and The Unfair Fare Affair * (1968), #17 UK and #18 US. For the GIRL FROM U.N.C.L. E. series he wrote #4: The Cornish Pixie Affair * (1967). [JC/PN]Other work: Hell for Tomorrow (1966). LESSER, DERWIN [s] Charles D. HORNIG. LESSER, MILTON (1925-1988) US writer, more recently author of many crime novels and a few sf stories under what he eventually took as his real name, Stephen Marlowe. His sf mostly appeared in the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines, including his first story, "All Heroes are Hated" (1950), but he was an active fan for some years before that. His other pseudonyms for sf included Adam CHASE, C.H. Thames (27 times), Christopher Thames (once), and the house name S.M. TENNESHAW; he has also written thrillers as Thames, Andrew Frazer and Jason Ridgway, as well as an Ellery Queen novel, Dead Man's Tale (1961). He wrote the juvenile sf novels Earthbound (1952), The Star Seekers (1953), Stadium Beyond the Stars (1960) and Spacemen Go Home (1961). Novels reprinted from magazines are Recruit for Andromeda (1953 Imagination as "Voyage to Eternity"; exp 1959), Secret of the Black Planet (1952 AMZ as "Secret of the Black Planet" and "Son of the Black Chalice"; fixup 1965), and The Golden Ape (1957 AMZ as "The Quest of the Golden Ape" by Adam Chase and Ivar JORGENSEN; 1959 as by Chase), which latter he wrote in collaboration with Paul W. FAIRMAN. ML also edited the anthology Looking Forward (anth 1953). He abandoned sf in the early 1960s, but some of his recent thrillers, notably the supernatural horror story Translation (1976) and The Valkyrie Encounter (1978), both as Marlowe, have fantastic elements; these are much more effective than his routine action-adventure sf. [BS]See also: GENERATION STARSHIPS. LESSING, DORIS (1919- ) Persian (Iranian)-born Southern Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) writer, in UK from 1949. She is best known for her searching examinations of the position of women in the world in such novels as The Golden Notebook (1962). The 5 vols of her Children of Violence sequence deal more expansively with the same problems, and The Four-Gated City (1969), which ends the series, moves in its final pages rapidly into the NEAR FUTURE, providing in this fashion a somewhat apocalyptic perspective on the preceding volumes from a viewpoint tinged with Sufi mysticism. This Persian form of Islam, influenced by Indian religions, is centrally concerned with the union of the soul with a Higher Being, in terms which are at times surprisingly literal, invoking a kind of drama of the steps one may take in order to achieve transcendence and the permanence of the soul. Much of DL's later work, especially the Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence, can be seen as exegetical of Sufist precepts.Before and after the latter series, however, DL wrote four singletons of some sf interest. Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) puts a schizophreniac through a mythic journey. The Summer Before the Dark (1973) submits to a similar voyage of external/internal discovery a woman at a point of crisis in her life. In The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) a woman watches the end of urban civilization from her window, never leaving her room, while a young girl grows up beside her, giving some muted hope for human continuity; it was filmed as MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981). The Fifth Child (1988 US) explores with considerable intensity the consequences of giving birth to an infant so destructive of the humans around him that he seems to be a genuine changeling. Far more expansively than these "domestic" novels, the Canopus in Argos: Archives books place the crises of human self-striving into a metaphysically conceived interstellar frame. Each individual novel in the sequence - Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta (1979 US), The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980 US), The Sirian Experiments (1981 US), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982 US) and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983 US) - depicts an exemplary drama of the soul, as inhabitants of various planets, under the distant aegis of the Canopan Empire, attempt to come to terms with sexuality, politics, mortality and transcendence. Shikasta is Earth; the other novels make use of other venues. Everywhere the drive - sometimes thwarted - is towards literal union with universal principles (or God). The series exudes, at times, a piety not normally associated with sf; but at others the perspectives it opens are illuminating. In DL's hands, the instruments of sf become parables. [JC]Other work: No Witchcraft for Sale: Stories and Short Novels (coll 1956 Russia).About the author: Doris Lessing (1983 chap) by Lorna Sage; Doris Lessing (1985) by Mona Knapp; Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing (1985) by Katherine Fishburn.See also: ADAM AND EVE; DISASTER; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MUSIC; WOMEN SF WRITERS. LESSNER, ERWIN (CHRISTIAN) (1898-1959) US writer in whose Phantom Victory: The Fourth Reich 1945-1960 (1944) an underground cadre of Nazi officers successfully conspires to conquer the world in the name of a resurgent Germany ( HITLER WINS). [JC] LESTER, ANDREW Terry GREENHOUGH. LESTER, EDWARD (1831-1905) UK clergyman and writer in whose The Siege of Bodike: A Prophecy of Ireland's Future (1886) the separation of Ireland from the ruling UK is prevented in large part by the narrator, in a BALLOON; and the landlords return. [JC] LESTER, IRVIN [s] Fletcher PRATT. L'ESTRANGE, MILES Pseudonym of an unidentified late-19th-century UK writer whose What We are Coming To (1892) describes in satirical terms its narrator's response to a rationalized England where women have been emancipated. Platonia: A Tale of Other Worlds (1893) rather more interestingly presents its narrator with an ancient design for a spacecraft which takes him to the eponymous planet, located this side of Mars, where an oddity of the atmosphere permits telescopic perusal of our world as it was 100 years before. [JC] LETHEM, JONATHAN (ALLEN) (1964- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "The Cave Beneath the Falls" for Aboriginal in 1989, and who has published at least 35 stories since, the best known of them probably being "The Happy Man" (1991). His first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), meticulously rehabilitates the noir narrative voice CYBERPUNK writers notoriously acquired from writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, not only through the exactitude of the stylistic miming involved, but also because the setting, characters and overall ambience of the tale directly homage the earlier masters. The setting is a cloistral NEAR FUTURE California; and the main character (who narrates) is a private eye in a world which has been reduced-rather than liberated-by the recursiveness of a culture near the end of its tether. In the terrified, shrinking world of Gun, With Occasional Music, it is socially unacceptable to ask personal questions; drugs like Forgettol continue to reduce the mental spaces available to humanity; a weary dictatorial police state gives thugs in its employ the right to punish citizens by reducing their "karmic points" until they have none, and are sent to deepfreeze; animals and babies, transmogrified by "evolution therapy", walk and talk. The nightmarishness of the book derives, perhaps, from a sense that JL has-as accurately as or Steve ERICKSON-captured the surreal underlying bleakness of any future Hammett or Chandler might actually have imagined. JL's next novel, Amnesia Moon (1995), is eagerly awaited. [JC] LEVACK, DANIEL J.H. (? - ) US bibliographer and critic, author of several author BIBLIOGRAPHIES including Fantasms: A Bibliography of the Literature of Jack Vance (1978 chap with Tim UNDERWOOD; rev vt Fantasms II 1979 with Underwood and Kurt Cockrum; rev 1979), PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography (1981; rev 1988), Amber Dreams: A Roger Zelazny Bibliography (1983) and Dune Master: A Frank Herbert Bibliography (1988). The leisurely production schedules of some academic firms in the sf field may account for the failure of the Frank HERBERT bibliography or of the Philip K. DICK text in its 1988 "revision" to incorporate posthumous data. [JC] LEVEN, JEREMY (1941- ) US writer whose two sf novels, Creator (1980) and Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr Seymour Kassler, J.S.P.S. (1982), both apply a sometimes portentous mainstream sensibility to generic conceits. In the first, the attempted creation of a CLONE to replace a dead wife activates considerable brooding about a variety of issues. In the second a COMPUTER turns out to house the eponymous Principle, invoking thoughts about the mind and the brain. [JC]See also: PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGION. LEVENE, MALCOLM (1937- ) UK writer whose Carder's Paradise (1968) describes the mixed blessings of a completely automated society whose inhabitants are kept busy by complex entertainments. [JC] LEVENE, PHILIP [r] J.L. MORRISSEY. LEVETT, OSWALD [r] AUSTRIA. LEVI, PRIMO (1919-1987) Italian survivor of Auschwitz, industrial chemist, autobiographer, essayist and writer of fiction: one of the most distinguished men of letters of his generation, winning international fame late in life. In much of his work - e.g., Il sistema periodica (1975; trans Raymond Rosenthal as The Periodic Table 1984 US) - metaphors drawn from science illuminate subjects normally thought of as literary or historical, in a manner unusual in Europe generally and especially unusual for a writer in ITALY, a country where the gap between the two cultures is especially wide. This is true also of his sf stories, mostly sharp, ironical fables, almost reductionist, that nevertheless often metamorphose into direct affirmations of the values of life in a way unusual in sf anywhere. Many feature a discomforting exploitation of strange inventions, or a distancing alien perspective on human life. PL's sf stories appear in 2 Italian collections, Storie naturali (coll 1966) as by Damiano Malabaila, and Vizio di forma (coll 1977), collected together in English as The Sixth Day and Other Tales (trans Raymond Rosenthal omni 1990 US). A typical story is "Excellent is the Water", where a gradual increase in the viscosity of water in an Italian river spreads to become a worldwide phenomenon, thereby serving as an image of the torpor and lethargy of the heart's flow in our 20th-century world. [PN]Other works: La Chiave a Stella (1978; trans William Weaver as The Monkey's Wrench 1986 US; vt The Wrench 1987 UK) contains embedded fabular tales.See also: CLONES. LEVIATHAN Film (1989). Gordon Co./Filmauro. Dir George P. Cosmatos, starring Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Amanda Pays. Screenplay David Peoples and Jeb Stuart, based on a story by Peoples. 98 mins. Colour.One of several undersea- ALIEN movies of the period, L most resembles (and improves on) DEEPSTAR SIX (1988), especially in the near-identical finale. In this efficiently scary but routine horror-adventure film, miners at an undersea base discover a sunken Russian submarine which turns out to have been the jettisoned arena for dangerous experiments in genetic manipulation. Two of the miners, infected, mutate into a shapeshifting MONSTER of familiar format, like a downmarket cross between the menaces in ALIEN and the 1982 remake of The THING . Few survive. [PN]See also: MONSTER MOVIES. LEVIE, REX DEAN (1937?- ) US businessman and writer whose The Insect Warriors (1965) deals with problems humans face on a world where they are the size of insects. [JC] LEVIN, IRA (1929- ) US playwright and novelist whose first book, A Kiss Before Dying (1953), is an extremely impressive chiller. He is best known for the fantasy Rosemary's Baby (1967), in which the Devil impregnates a young woman; the book was filmed by Roman Polanski in 1968. IL moved into sf proper with This Perfect Day (1970), a DYSTOPIAN view of a cybernetically regimented future ( COMPUTERS), and The Stepford Wives (1972), which was soon filmed ( The STEPFORD WIVES ), a horrific morality tale about a US suburb whose men have turned their womenfolk into compliant ROBOTS. The last 3 titles were assembled as Three by Ira Levin (omni 1985). His most impressive book is perhaps The Boys from Brazil (1976), filmed as The BOYS FROM BRAZIL , a complex story involving the cloning ( CLONES) of cells from Adolf Hitler's body in order to later impregnate a number of women with young Hitlers, whom a Brazilian neo-Nazi group headed by Dr Josef Mengele tries to raise in environments as close as possible to that in which the Fuhrer himself was raised. IL applies to sf themes meticulous style and plotting, along with a certain fascination with the multitude of ways in which women can be violated. [JC]Other works: Nightmares: Three Great Suspense Novels (omni 1981), assembling A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives; Sliver (1991), associational.See also: HISTORY OF SF; SATIRE. LEVY, DAVID (1913- ) US film executive and writer in whose The Gods of Foxcroft (1970) the protagonist awakes from SUSPENDED ANIMATION to find the world of 500 years hence suffering under ecologically disastrous circumstances which have forced humans into cramped habitats; meanwhile, ALIENS are observing us from space. [JC] LEWIN, LEONARD C(ASE) (1916- ) US writer whose spoof paper, Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (1967), presents the conclusions of a US Government commission formed to consider the economic and political threat of world peace. In a tone of cunningly egregious Realpolitik, the commission urges that the world be kept on a continual WAR-footing. Triage (1972) is a NEAR-FUTURE novel about growing political oppression in the USA; the government secretly applies the wartime medical practice of triage to social "problems" with the aim of eliminating them - literally ( OVERPOPULATION). [JC] LEWIS, ANTHONY R(ICHARD) (1941- ) US bibliographer who compiled, solo and with others, various indexes for the New England Science Fiction Association, including The N.E.S.F.A. Index to the Science Fiction Magazines and Original Anthologies, 1966 (1969 chap), 1967 (1968 chap), 1968 (1969 chap), 1969 (1970 chap), 1966-1970 (1971 chap), 1971-1972 (1973 chap) with Andrew Adams WHYTE, 1973 (1974 chap) with Whyte, 1974 (1975 chap) with Whyte and George Flynn, 1975 (1976 chap) with Whyte, 1976 (1977 chap) with Whyte and Jerry BOYAJIAN, 1977-78 (1983 chap) with Whyte, 1979-1980 (1982 chap) with Whyte, 1981 (1982 chap) with Whyte, 1982 (1983 chap) with Whyte, 1983 (1984 chap) with Whyte, 1984 (1985 chap), 1985 (1986 chap), 1986 (1988 chap) and The N.E.S.F.A. Index to Short SF, 1987 (1989 chap). Other works have included The Best of Astounding (anth 1978) as by Tony Lewis, Concordance to Cordwainer Smith (1984 chap) and, most interestingly, An Annotated Bibliography of Recursive Science Fiction (1990 chap). [JC]See also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES; RECURSIVE SF. LEWIS, BRIAN (1929-1978) UK illustrator. A skilled painter whose work dominated UK sf magazine covers in the mid- and late 1950s, BL often showed a strong influence from Surrealists such as Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Max Ernst (1891-1976), perhaps partly mediated through the book-cover illustration of Richard POWERS. This style was encouraged for a time by the editor John CARNELL in Science Fiction Adventures (19 covers), NW (41 covers) and Science Fantasy (21 covers), although some of these were representational, a manner BL adopted when it was required of him. His colours were strong and plain and seemed laid on thickly, an impression few other illustrators give. Besides his work in sf magazines, BL drew COMIC strips in newspapers (for a time he worked on DAN DARE - PILOT OF THE FUTURE) and then went into stop-motion film animation and children's puppet films. [JG/PN]See also: ILLUSTRATION. LEWIS, CAROLINE Harold BEGBIE. LEWIS, CHARLES Roger DIXON. LEWIS, C(LIVE) S(TAPLES) (1898-1963) UK author and critic, born in Belfast; Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925-54, and finally Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. Most of his writing, whether directly or indirectly, was Christian apologetics; this was as true of his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) as of the fantasy The Screwtape Letters (1942; exp vt The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast 1961), in which an older devil writes letters of advice to a younger, devising various means of winning human souls. In Oxford CSL was friendly with Charles WILLIAMS (another Anglican) and J.R.R. TOLKIEN (a Roman Catholic). All three were Christian moralists with a strong interest in allegory or fantasy, and (with others) they formed a casual society, the Inklings, during whose meetings they read to each other from works in progress.CSL's most popular fiction is for children, and is allegorical FANTASY, although it uses many sf devices, including TIME TRAVEL, other DIMENSIONS and PARALLEL WORLDS. The kingdom of Narnia, to which various human children travel, is ruled by a lion, Aslan, who is "crucified" by a wicked witch. There are many excitingly described perils, most with a direct Christian allegorical application. Widely loved by children as straightforward fantasy, the series is: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and his Boy (1954), The Magician's Nephew (1955), which comes first in terms of the internal chronology, and The Last Battle (1956); omnibuses include Prince Caspian & The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (omni 1990) and Tales of Narnia: The Silver Chair & The Last Battle (omni 1990). Two fantasies for adults are The Great Divorce (1945 chap), a minor allegory about Heaven and Hell, and Till We Have Faces (1956), a dark retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche which some of his admirers consider his best work.CSL's primary contribution to sf proper is the Cosmic Trilogy (or Ransom Trilogy) about the linguist Dr Ransom, who like Christ is at one point offered as a ransom for mankind: OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938), Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus 1953), and That Hideous Strength (1945; cut 1955; cut version vt The Tortured Planet 1958 US). The first two novels are PLANETARY ROMANCES with elements of medieval mythology. Each planet is seen as having a tutelary spirit; those of the other planets are both good and accessible, while that of Earth is fallen, twisted and not known directly by most humans. These two books are powerfully imagined, although their scientific content is intermittently absurd. The effect of lesser GRAVITY on Martian plant and animal life is rendered with great economy and vividness, as is Ransom's first sight of the water world of Venus, a rich exercise in PERCEPTION; in a passage as purely evocative of a sense of alien wonder as anything in sf, Ransom's human eyes cannot at first make sense of the strangeness about him. The religious allegory of Perelandra, however, in which an evil SCIENTIST plays Satanic tempter to the female ruler of Venus, a new Eve, is deeply conservative and also - in its courtly, romantic (and some may think dehumanizing) view of womanhood - sexist. Lewis's ideology of gender is spelled out in detail in a number of essays and in the critical book A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), which can be seen as a template for Perelandra.The third volume, That Hideous Strength, is set on contemporary Earth, and is more directly occult in its genre machinery than either of its predecessors. The fury of CSL's attack on scientific "humanism" or "scientism" (science directed towards purely worldly ends) is very nearly unbalanced, and leads to grossly melodramatic caricature of scientists and government-supported research units in general, and of H.G. WELLS in particular, here grotesquely envisaged as a vulgar cockney journalist, Jules. The book's attack on government indifference to ECOLOGY won it a new audience in the late 1960s. CSL's attitude towards any form of modernism was neatly encapsulated by a remark he made during a lecture on medieval poetry in 1938: "And then the Renaissance came and spoiled everything." The three books are collected in The Cosmic Trilogy (omni 1990).Some of CSL's minor essays in and about sf, including a transcript of a talk with Brian W. ALDISS and Kingsley AMIS, can be found in the posthumous Of Other Worlds (coll 1966) ed Walter Hooper, which includes 2 stories originally published in FSF. A later posthumous work is The Dark Tower and Other Stories (coll 1977) ed Hooper. It has been strongly suggested by Kathryn Lindskoog (1934- ) in The C.S. Lewis Hoax (1988) that the Reverend Hooper - CSL's secretary for only one month - forged various items of posthumously published CSL material included in The Dark Tower, a charge which has been strenuously denied. Lindskoog offered a vigorous counter-rebuttal in "The Dark Scandal: Science Fiction Forgery" (1992 Quantum #42), but in that year it was revealed that she herself had been forging letters to do with the Hooper issue - indeed, she admitted as much, though she described her 14 forged letters as a lighthearted "prank". What there can be no doubt about is that the works assembled by Hooper have affected readers as being both sexually poisonous and egregiously amateur. [PN]Other works: Dymer (chap 1926), a narrative fantastic poem as by Clive Hamilton; The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933; rev 1943); On Stories, and Other Essays in Literature (coll 1982; vt Of This and Other Worlds 1984); Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985).As Editor: Essays Presented to Charles Williams (anth 1947), including the influential "On Fairy-Stories" by Tolkien.About the author: About 50 book-length studies of CSL's life and work exist, perhaps the most distinguished biography being C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990) by A.N. Wilson. Further biographical material appear in Shadowlands: The Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman (1985) by Brian Sibley, based on Bill Nicholson's tv drama Shadowlands, which was also a successful stage play. This was in turn filmed as Shadowlands (1993), dir Richard Attenborough, screenplay by Nicholson, with Anthony Hopkins as CSL and Debra Winger as Joy. Other studies include: Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (anth 1969; exp 1979) ed Mark R. HILLEGAS, which contains an entertaining and passionate attack on CSL by the Marxist biologist and author J.B.S. HALDANE; The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C.S. Lewis (coll 1977) ed Peter J. Schakel; The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis (1979) by Chad Walsh; C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement (1987) by C.N. MANLOVE.See also: ALIENS; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CHILDREN'S SF; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GODS AND DEMONS; HORROR IN SF; ISLANDS; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LINGUISTICS; LIVING WORLDS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MARS; MESSIAHS; MYTHOLOGY; RELIGION; SOCIAL DARWINISM; VENUS. LEWIS, IRWIN (1916- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "To Invade New York" for ASF in 1963. This story's basic idea was incorporated into his first novel, The Day They Invaded New York (1964), in which invading ALIENS confuse New Yorkers by fouling the transportation systems of the great city. A second novel, The Day New York Trembled (1967), creates its chaos through a pain-relieving drug and its unexpected consequences. [JC] LEWIS, OSCAR (1893-1992) US editor and writer whose ALTERNATE-WORLD novel, The Lost Years (1951), depicts the last years of Abraham Lincoln in a world where he was never assassinated. [JC] LEWIS, (ERNEST MICHAEL) ROY (1913- ) UK novelist and journalist, editor of New Commonwealth 1953-4, later with the Economist and The Times, and the author of several political/sociological studies. His sf novel, What We Did to Father (1960; vt The Evolution Man 1963; vt Once Upon an Ice Age 1979; vt The Evolution Man; or, How I Ate my Father 1992), amusingly concentrates human cultural EVOLUTION during the Pleistocene into the hands of one man, the narrator's father, all of whose discoveries are seen in terms of their extrapolated effects. Not surprisingly, the parricide which ends the book is nothing if not proto-neo-Freudian.The Extraordinary Reign of King Ludd: An Historical Tease (1990) is an ALTERNATE WORLD story, a utopian SATIRE in which Queen Victoria abdicates in 1849 and International Socialism triumphs. A Walk with Mr Gladstone (1991 chap) is a gaslight romance featuring the UK prime minister and other characters, some historical, some RECURSIVE. [JC]See also: ORIGIN OF MAN. LEWIS, (HARRY) SINCLAIR (1885-1951) US writer, highly esteemed in the 1920s and 1930s for such novels as Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922) and first US winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1930), but with much diminished reputation today. His first novel, Hike and the Aeroplane (1912) as by Tom Graham, is a juvenile centred on a futuristic 200mph (320kph) aircraft; Arrowsmith (1925) is not so much sf as fiction about science, contrasting the idealism of the research SCIENTIST with the avarice and greed of the medical profession in general. SL's sf novel, It Can't Happen Here (1935), warns of how a Nazi-like regime could come to power in the USA. SL pays little attention to the nature of political institutions in this book, but that is not to say that he is guilty of political naivety ( POLITICS): his analysis of how fascist regimes can come to power largely through the "little man's" apathy and perceived powerlessness is a potent example of the dreadful-warning tale. His NEAR-FUTURE scenario contrasts interestingly with Gordon EKLUND's very similar portrait of 1930s authoritarianism in All Times Possible (1974), though in the latter case there is an ALTERNATE-WORLDS framework. [JC] LEWIS, (PERCY) WYNDHAM (1884-1957) UK writer and painter, known in the latter capacity as the instigator of Vorticism. His illustrations for Naomi MITCHISON's Beyond This Limit (1935 chap) constitute a co-creation of the book, which she acknowledged. As an author, he was responsible for determinedly Modernist manifestos such as The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? (1919 chap) and novels such as The Apes of God (1930). Of particular sf interest is The Human Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928; rev 1956), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, the two latter novels being first published together as The Human Age: Book Two Monstre Gai, Book Three Malign Fiesta (1955). Like Philip Jose FARMER's Riverworld series, though with greater impact, The Human Age depicts the posthumous existence of various characters. Pulley and Satters, the two freshly deceased protagonists of The Childermass, observe and join in the jousting, linguistic and intellectual, that surrounds the Bailiff, a sort of doorkeeper who decides the eligibility of applicants to the Magnetic City, and who, in Monstre Gai, takes them into the Third City, a DYSTOPIA based on the post-WWII UK and its Welfare State. Finding life difficult there, they all go on to Matapolis in Malign Fiesta, but Matapolis is Hell, and punishments abound; there is a sense of suffocating evil. A fourth volume, The Trial of Man, in which the two protagonists were to be transported to Heaven, remained unwritten. The arduousness of The Childermass, a major 20th-century novel, has kept many readers from its much more clear-cut sequels. WL is much less read than read about, a situation to be deplored. [JC]See also: ROBERT HALE LIMITED. LEWITT, S.N. Working name of US writer Shariann Lewitt (1954- ); the N. stands for "Nothing". She began publishing sf with "St Joey the Action" in Perpetual Light (anth 1982) ed Alan Ryan. After First and Final Rites (1984), a fantasy novel published as by Shariann Lewitt, she released the first of the military SPACE OPERAS with which she soon became identified: White Wing (1985) with Susan M. SHWARTZ, writing together as Gordon Kendall. Angel at Apogee (1987), her first book as SNL and perhaps her best, features a complicated (at times congested) PLANETARY-ROMANCE plot in which much fighting co-exists with the author's punk sensibility; it tells the story of a female pilot who must come to terms with the two submerged races which revolt against her father's hegemony over the planet in question. Other novels which similarly stretch the conventions of military sf include Cyberstealth (1989) - and its sequel Dancing Vac (1991) - and Blind Justice (1991). Her ties in the U.S.S.A. SHARED-WORLD enterprise, U. S.S.A. Book 2 * (1987) and Book 4 * (1987), are of less interest, but Cybernetic Jungle (1992), set in a near-future CYBERPUNK Brazil, is a complex (although perhaps not entirely original) tale, and Songs of Chaos (1993) provides something of the same mix, though this tale of a "normal" human in a population otherwise modified through GENETIC ENGINEERING moves eventually into interstellar space. [JC] LEY, WILLY (1906-1969) German-born scientist and scientific writer who emigrated to the USA in 1935. In Germany he had been part of a small group which, early on, had believed in the potential of rocket propulsion (some went on to become famous for the construction of the V2). His first book was Die Fahrt ins Weltall ["Journey into Space"] (1926); his second, Die Moglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt ["The Possibility of Interplanetary Travel"] (1928), was to be one of the inspirations behind the film (and book) Die FRAU IM MOND (1929; vt The Girl in the Moon). In the USA his well researched, precise science articles became a notable feature of the SF MAGAZINES, especially ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION (from 1937) and AMAZING STORIES (from 1940). He became Science Editor of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION in Sep 1952, having in March of that year begun there a science column which would last until his death. During the brief period when science-fact articles were a HUGO category, he received 2. He wrote 3 sf stories as Robert Willey.WL was also a prolific author of books on science, especially on ROCKETS and SPACE FLIGHT. Perhaps his best-known (and certainly most beautiful) book was The Conquest of Space (1949), with splendid illustrations, many in colour, by Chesley BONESTELL; it won the nonfiction category of the INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD in 1951. Lands Beyond (1952) with L. Sprague DE CAMP, a historical account of strange explorations and discoveries, won the same award in 1953. Of the science-fact writers intimately connected with GENRE SF, only De Camp, Arthur C. CLARKE and Isaac ASIMOV could rival WL. One of the Moon's craters is named in his honour. [PN]Other works (all nonfiction): The Lungfish and the Unicorn (1941; rev vt The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Unicorn 1948); The Days of Creation (1941; rev 1952); Shells and Shooting (1942); Rockets (1944; rev vt Rockets and Space Travel 1947; rev vt Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel 1951; rev 1957; rev vt Rockets, Missiles and Men in Space 1968); Dragons in Amber (1951); Engineer's Dreams (1954); Salamanders and Other Wonders (1955); The Exploration of Mars (1956; vt Project Mars 1962 UK) with Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), illus Bonestell; Satellites, Rockets and Outer Space (1958; rev 1962); Space Stations (1958); Space Travel (1958); Exotic Zoology (1959) featuring rearranged selections from his previous books on natural history; Watchers of the Skies (1963); Beyond the Solar System (1964) illus Bonestell; Missiles, Moonprobes and Megaparsecs (1964); Ranger to the Moon (1965); On Earth and in the Sky (coll 1967); Another Look at Atlantis (coll 1969); The Drifting Continents (1969); Events in Space (1969); Gas Giants: The Largest Planets (1969); Visitors from Afar: The Comets (1969).See also: SPACE HABITATS; SUN. LEYDENFROST, A(LEXANDER) (1889-1961) US illustrator born in Hungary, where he lived until he was 34; his father was a Dutch illustrator. Although forgotten by most fans today, AL was one of the best sf artists of the 1940s, particularly when elements of fantasy or horror were required. His often grotesque, heavily shadowed and hideous forms sprawled across the pages of such magazines as Planet Stories, Super Science Stories, Astonishing Stories and Famous Fantastic Mysteries. While AL's black-and-white ILLUSTRATIONS were strong and dynamic with expressive lines and stark contrasts, his colour work, which included 2 covers for Planet Stories, was strained and awkward. In the 1920s and 1930s he had worked as an interior designer and commercial artist, and many of his later illustrations were for the "slicks", notably Esquire and Life. His sons Bob and Harry both briefly illustrated for Planet Stories in the mid-1940s. [JG/PN] L5 LAGRANGE POINT. LIBERTARIAN SF A political movement ( POLITICS) originating in and largely confined to the USA, libertarianism is a form of anarchism - or "minarchism", the desire for an extremely limited state - which emphasizes (nonviolent) competition rather than the voluntary cooperation proposed by the older strand of anarchist thinking, as exemplified by the writings of such theorists as Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) or, in the sf field, by Ursula K. LE GUIN's The Dispossessed (1974). The libertarian branch is generally characterized as a "right-wing" type of anarchism (in the sense that the [traditional] anarcho-syndicalists are "left-wing") through the premise that voluntarily entered contracts are the only form of social interaction that can be literally enforced (as opposed to, for example, state taxation as a way of funding a democratically elected government). A common libertarian assumption is that, in the absence of government intervention, the free market will bring about almost unlimited growth in available technology and personal wealth, thus solving any problems of human poverty. These views are frequently associated with a belief in "positive thinking" and a fundamental OPTIMISM about human potential.Uniquely among political movements, many of libertarianism's most influential texts have been by sf writers. Books from both inside and outside the genre which strongly affected the early development of the movement include Ayn RAND's Atlas Shrugged (1957), most of the early works of Robert A. HEINLEIN (up to, and culminating in, THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS [1966]) and, to a lesser extent, C.M. KORNBLUTH's The Syndic (1953). These works could be said to be "proto-libertarian" in nature - a description which applies particularly to Rand, founder of the allied Objectivist philosophy. Explicitly libertarian fictions, with their characteristically detailed alternative societies and economic systems, did not begin to appear until the 1970s, with the publication of J. Neil SCHULMAN's Alongside Night (1979) and the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975) by Robert SHEA and Robert Anton WILSON. This trilogy - along with associated texts such as the Schrodinger's Cat books from 1981 - probably represents the best of libertarian sf. Other recent novels of significance have been F. Paul WILSON's An Enemy of the State (1980) and the long series of mildly comic adventures by L. Neil SMITH beginning with The Probability Broach (1980). Authors currently writing from a libertarian perspective include Melinda SNODGRASS (the Circuit trilogy), James P. HOGAN (notably in Voyage from Yesteryear [1982]), Victor KOMAN, Brad LINAWEAVER, Victor MILAN, Jerry POURNELLE and Vernor VINGE.The Prometheus and Prometheus Hall of Fame trophies ( AWARDS) are given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society for, respectively, the best libertarian novel of the year and the past novel most worth retrospective attention. While nonsympathizers may be repelled by libertarian sf's frequent concentration on adventure rather than character, its sometimes casual attitude towards violence, and its loose association with the principles of SOCIAL DARWINISM, the libertarian writers themselves might argue that they have made a genuine and deep-felt commitment to their vision of human freedom. It seems likely that the influence of the movement within sf will grow. [NT] LIBRARIES OF SF COLLECTIONS. LICHTENBERG, JACQUELINE (1942- ) US writer who began publishing sf with "Operation High Time" for Worlds of If in 1969, but soon concentrated on fan fiction set in the OPEN UNIVERSE permitted by the owners of STAR TREK; Star Trek Lives! (1975) with Sondra MARSHAK and Joan Winston is a famous nonfiction description of the early days of Star Trek fandom. Her first book was House of Zeor (1974), the initial volume of the Sime/Gen sequence, also an open-universe series, which continued with Unto Zeor, Forever (1978), First Channel (1980) with Jean LORRAH, Mahogany Trinrose (1981), Channel's Destiny (1982) with Lorrah, RenSime (1984) and Zelerod's Doom (1986) with Lorrah. The series is set 1000 years after a mutation has split the human race into Gens and Simes; the latter survive by sucking life force ("selyn") from the former, a process that is fatal unless effected through a specially mutated Sime called a Channel. First Channel and Channel's Destiny describe the first appearance of Channels in a society which has been reduced to near-barbarism by undeclared war between the two subspecies. House of Zeor and later volumes (in terms of internal chronology) follow the gradual evolution of a compromise, and move toward a sense that the two subspecies together may form a whole greater than the sum of the parts. The considerable success of the series may be partially due to the sexual connotations of the Sime/Gen relationship, particularly the Simes' use of remarkably phallic tentacles to (sometimes forcibly) acquire selyn.A second sequence, the Molt Brothers series - Molt Brother (1982) and City of a Million Legends (1985) - deals with relationships between humans and members of a reptilian species (the Kren) who must choose special companions to guard them when they moult. The Dushau trilogy - Dushau (1985), Farfetch (1985) and Outreach (1986) - tells the story of a rebellion against a repressive galactic empire by the human heroine and a group of alien empaths who establish rapport with planetary ecologies.Although JL's prose is sometimes undistinguished and her backgrounds are routine, she has acquired many dedicated readers through writing about intensely emotional cross-species relationships based on mutual affection and need. [NT]Other works: Those of My Blood (1988) and its sequel, Dreamspy (1989).See also: ECOLOGY. LIDDELL, C.H. [s] Henry KUTTNER. LIEBERMAN, ROBERT (HOWARD) (1941- ) US writer who worked initially as a teacher of mathematics and physics at university level until becoming a full-time writer in 1979. His third novel, Baby (1981), tells of the consequences when an elderly spinster gives virgin birth to a child with a beautiful singing voice. Perfect People (1986) sets its post-holocaust DYSTOPIA in an underground city. [JC] LIFE AFTER DEATH ESCHATOLOGY; REINCARNATION. LIFEFORCE Film (1985). Cannon. Dir Tobe Hooper, starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May, Patrick Stewart. Screenplay Dan O'Bannon, Don Jakoby, based on The Space Vampires (1976) by Colin WILSON. 101 mins. Colour.Astronauts exploring Halley's Comet discover three humanoid ALIEN bodies in suspended animation in crystal containers in a derelict alien spacecraft, and recover them. All but one of the astronauts die; the strange bodies awaken back in London, and prove to be shapeshifting vampiric lifeforms which, by sucking the lifeforce from people, turn them into withered zombies who themselves can pass on the zombie infection. Soon London becomes a zombie city. The narrative borders on incoherence, non sequiturs abound, and the film is a melodramatic travesty, especially the performance of Finlay as a "thanatologist" (student of death). And yet it has its virtues. John Dykstra, famous for his work in STAR WARS (1977), produces arresting special effects, and Hooper, best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), directs with an intensity verging on the hysterical. The film, though a mess (partly through being based on Wilson's heavily philosophical but muddled novel), is original and, despite all the zombies, avoids cliche. May's nude performance as the female alien is striking. [PN] LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS Early interplanetary travellers invariably discovered worlds which were markedly akin to Earth. Without a theory of EVOLUTION for a guide, let alone any but the most primitive awareness of ECOLOGY, the imaginative creation of other-worldly life was inevitably a haphazard and arbitrary process. One notable exception is Johannes KEPLER's attempt to imagine lunar life in the last pages of Somnium (1634). There is little in most other pre-20th-century accounts to distinguish other worlds from the strange Earthly lands featured in many travellers' tales and romances ( ANTHROPOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; LOST WORLDS). Camille FLAMMARION was the first writer to apply Lamarckian and Darwinian ideas to the construction of hypothetical ALIEN worlds, in Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes reels (1864; trans as Real and Imaginary Worlds 1865 US) and Lumen (1872; exp 1887); and his later romance of other-worldly reincarnation, Urania (1890), offers a description, albeit relatively undetailed, of the Martian biosphere. Flammarion's contemporary, C.I. DEFONTENAY, gave a comprehensive description of life on another world in Star, ou Psi de Cassiopee (1854; trans as Star 1975 US), but biological speculation was muted. Most late-19th-century interplanetary romances similarly feature pseudo-human races and are vehicles for political and sociological rather than biological hypothesis. Exotic milieux are used merely to provide local colour for interplanetary tourists, as in George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901). Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895) takes some trouble to convey an impression of the multifariousness of life on other worlds, but does not pause for detailed description. Even H.G. WELLS, a writer whose biological training qualified him to take on the job of designing an alien life-system, shirked the task; the Selenite society in THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901) is given only the most cursory supportive ECOLOGY. Wells's French contemporary J.H. ROSNY aine was similarly shy until 1922, when he included a fairly elaborate description of an alien life-system in his LOST-WORLD story L'etonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (1922; rewritten rather than trans by Philip Jose FARMER as Ironcastle, 1976).The favourite abode of other-worldly life in early sf was MARS, and an approximate consensus image of the Martian biosphere slowly grew up, much encouraged by Mars as the Abode of Life (1908) by the eccentric US astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916). The red deserts and the canals became CLICHES but, whether Mars was seen as a decadent world or as a primitive one, its biosphere tended to be somewhat stripped-down. A lush Mars is featured in Edwin Lester ARNOLD's daydream fantasy Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation (1905; vt Gulliver of Mars), the first of many novels to use the red planet as a backcloth for a swashbuckling adventure story, but Arnold and his successor in this vein, Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, were understandably uninterested in serious biosphere-design. A similar blithe disregard for matters of rational plausibility is exhibited not only by the great legion of Burroughs imitators - Otis Adelbert KLINE, Ralph Milne FARLEY, J.U. GIESY, Lin CARTER, Gardner F. FOX, Alan Burt Akers (Kenneth BULMER) et al. - but also by less derivative sf writers who adapted the underlying philosophy to their own purposes. Leigh BRACKETT, Ray BRADBURY and C.L. MOORE have helped to maintain a calculatedly nonrealistic image of Mars long beyond its natural lifespan, and Bradbury's curious amalgam of impossible romanticism and heavy nostalgia, exhibited in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (coll 1950; vt The Silver Locusts), remains so powerful that it still affects contemporary works like Ian MCDONALD's Desolation Road (1988). Indeed, the influence of this romantic image has been so great that it has had quite a marked influence upon supposedly realistic treatments of the planet like Arthur C. CLARKE's The Sands of Mars (1951) and James BLISH's Welcome to Mars (1967). Some early GENRE-SF writers did make an effort to introduce more variety and a greater degree of plausibility into their accounts of extraterrestrial life. Laurence MANNING's "The Wreck of the Asteroid" (1932), Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Moon Era" (1932) and Leslie F. STONE's "The Hell Planet" (1932) all show enterprise in this regard, but the story most remembered today as a crucial turning-point in the sophistication of other-worldly melodrama is "A Martian Odyssey" (1934) by Stanley G. WEINBAUM. Weinbaum went on to write a whole series of adventure stories set against the backgrounds of various weird alien ecologies, but no one seemed able to take up where he left off. John W. CAMPBELL Jr's Penton and Blake series (1936-8; fixup as The Planeteers 1966) is imitative of Weinbaum but much weaker. In 1939 Clifford D. SIMAK began a series intended to deal in a realistic manner with conditions on each of the planets in turn; of the 4 stories he completed the last, "Tools" (1942), is the most notable. Eric Frank RUSSELL, in the course of his own series of exploration stories-collected in Men, Martians, and Machines (coll of linked stories 1956) - produced the memorable "Symbiotica" (1944), but did little more in this line. Outside genre sf, very few writers tackled the problem of describing life on worlds unlike Earth. Olaf STAPLEDON's STAR MAKER (1937) is admirably wide-ranging but short on detail, save for one long description of a very Earthlike world. The fullest descriptions of other-worldly life offered by non-genre writers are to be found, oddly enough, in allegories inspired by the religious imagination: David LINDSAY's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920) and C.S. LEWIS's OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) and Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus).The sophistication of post-WWII sf encouraged attempts to tackle the problem of constructing strange alien life-systems more realistically. "Grandpa" (1955) by James H. SCHMITZ is a notable study of a complex marine lifecycle on an Earth-type planet. Conscientious attempts to design ecologies for unearthly physical circumstances were regularly made by Hal CLEMENT, most notably in MISSION OF GRAVITY (1953 ASF; 1954), Cycle of Fire (1957) and Close to Critical (1958 ASF; 1964), and by Poul ANDERSON, especially in "Call me Joe" (1957), War of the Wing-Men (1958; vt The Man who Counts) and Three Worlds to Conquer (1964). Anderson also produced a nonfiction work, Is There Life on Other Worlds? (1963), an early popularization of the speculative science of XENOBIOLOGY - the study of extraterrestrial life. Isaac ASIMOV wrote essays on this subject, and one of its leading exponents, Carl SAGAN, has also written sf. One of the most intriguing nonfictions in the field is Extraterrestrial Encounter (1979) by Chris BOYCE, another sf writer. One writer of the post-WWII period whose name is particularly associated with the detailed presentation of alien worlds is Jack VANCE, whose interest in alien ecology is linked to a strong concern for cultural ANTHROPOLOGY. His alien worlds usually have human populations cleverly adapted to and integrated into the native ecology, and his works carefully combine romanticism and earnest speculation (see also PLANETARY ROMANCE); outstanding among his many novels in this vein are Son of the Tree (1951 TWS; 1964), Big Planet (1952 Startling Stories; 1957), The Houses of Iszm (1954 Startling Stories; 1964), The Languages of Pao (1958), THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963), The Blue World (1966) and EMPHYRIO (1969). There also grew up in this post-WWII period, in calculated opposition to the romantic school of other-worldly adventures, a school of fiction which represented human life on other worlds as a grim and terrible battle against implacably hostile circumstances ( COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS).Popularization in the 1960s of the notion of impending ecological crisis in the real world brought about a significant change in emphasis in sf. The notion of "conquering" other worlds and mastering harsh environments by hard work and sheer determination - which reached its peak in such novels as Tom GODWIN's The Survivors (1958; vt Space Prison) and Harry HARRISON's Deathworld (1960) - found new ideological opposition in many stories emphasizing the notion of harmonious order ( ECOLOGY). Alien ecospheres possessing such perfection are often depicted, with mankind featuring either as an unthinking destroyer or as a candidate for membership whose case has yet to be judged. Such stories often embody a strong element of mysticism ( RELIGION; MYTHOLOGY). The representation of alien ecospheres as problematic Gardens of Eden has since become so commonplace as to be almost ritual; notable examples of the careful extension of this metaphor include Mark CLIFTON's Eight Keys to Eden (1960), Richard M. MCKENNA's "Hunter Come Home" (1963), John BOYD's ironic The Pollinators of Eden (1969), Ursula K. LE GUIN's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972; 1976), Neal BARRETT's Highwood (1972), Brian STABLEFORD's The Paradise Game (1974) and The Gates of Eden (1983), Stanislaw LEM's Edem (1959; trans as Eden 1989 US) and Michael D. RESNICK's Paradise (1989). Many of these works echo the forest fantasies of the great pioneer of ecological mysticism, W.H. HUDSON. The 1960s also produced two thorough and detailed accounts of human populations in alien environments which are particularly impressive: Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup 1965), with its description of life on the desert world Arrakis, and Ursula K. Le Guin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), which describes the life of hermaphroditic humans on the world of Winter. The scope which sf offered for much more detailed and considered modelling of alien environments was increased considerably during this period by virtue of the popularity of series novels, and, although interest remained focused almost exclusively on life-systems native to planets habitable by humankind, the foundations of various notable exercises in long-term "worldbuilding" were laid down. Marion Zimmer BRADLEY's Darkover series and Anne MCCAFFREY's Pern series provided models for various subsequent endeavours on a smaller scale. Much of this work is so heavily romanticized that it exists on the borderline between sf and FANTASY, being little more realistic in its speculative components than the Burroughsian romances which it has largely replaced, but the most competent writers in this vein of planetary romance bring considerable intelligence to bear on their work; one who has been consistently ambitious is C.J. CHERRYH, whose descriptions of other-worldly life in such novels as The Faded Sun (3 vols 1979-80) and Serpent's Reach (1980) are outstanding.The depiction of authentically alien life-systems has always been handicapped by the problems involved in using such systems as backgrounds to entertaining stories. An enormous amount of work goes into the design of an entire alien world, and it is not easy to blend that kind of artistry with the less esoteric creation of sensitive characterization and well-made plots. The most conscientious efforts of writers like Hal Clement and those who have followed in his footsteps - including Robert L. FORWARD in The Flight of the Dragonfly (1984; exp vt Rocheworld 1990) and Larry NIVEN in The Integral Trees (1984) and The Smoke Ring (1987) - run into acute problems in trying to integrate the enormous amounts of information they must get across with some kind of suspenseful narrative; Forward's novel was drastically cut for its first publication in the interests of finding a reasonable balance; its later reissue, restoring the additional information for the benefit of purists, required appendices full of graphs and diagrams. Novels which attempt to present an image of everyday life on alien worlds, without the benefit of human observers - notable examples include John BRUNNER's The Crucible of Time (1984), Brian HERBERT's Sudanna, Sudanna (1985) and Charles L. HARNESS's Redworld (1986) - suffer inevitable problems of reader-identification, and tend to take on an ironic, if not outrightly satirical, edge even if that was not the author's primary intention. Given these difficulties, it is not entirely surprising that the most memorable images of other-worldly life are often highly artificial, contained in stylized narratives whose main purpose is allegorical. [BS]See also: BIOLOGY; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; HIVE-MINDS; LIVING WORLDS. LIFT, DE (vt The Lift) Film (1983). Sigma Films. Dir Dick Maas, starring Huub Stapel, Willeke Van Ammelrooy. Screenplay and music Maas. 99 mins. Colour. This neat Dutch horror film with an sf rationale, dubbed atrociously into English, tells of a homicidal lift (elevator) in a high-rise office building. The lift is controlled by an organic, living computer (biochip), manufactured in Japan, which has run amuck and reprogrammed itself. The film belongs to the anti-technology tradition of killer MACHINES, common in sf cinema, to which also belong DEMON SEED (1977) and RUNAWAY (1984). [PN] LIGHT, JOHN (1943- ) UK writer of unremarkable sf novels, the first for ROBERT HALE LIMITED: The Well of Time (1981), The Legend of Melgor Erdin (1991) and Death on Dorado (1993 chap). [JC] LIGHTNER, A(LICE) M(ARTHA) (1904-1988) US writer and entomologist who began publishing her sf, all of which is for children, with "A New Game" for Boy's Life in 1959. Her first published novel, The Rock of Three Planets (1963) - its sequels were The Planet Poachers (1965) and The Space Ark (1968) - was followed by several other effective juveniles, though she came to general sf notice only with The Day of the Drones (1969), a post- HOLOCAUST story set half a millennium after a nuclear WAR. (This was actually her first-written novel; originally written for adults, it had been revised for publication as a juvenile.) As in Margot BENNETT's The Long Way Back (1954), Black Africa has survived. The two young protagonists, sent north on an exploratory mission, discover that the White remnants of UK civilization have evolved into a hive society ( HIVE-MINDS), and at a high cost save one (male) drone, who may (or may not) prove acceptable to the Black society back home. AML also wrote a number of nonfiction books of dramatized natural science as Alice L. Hopf, her married name. [JC]Other works: Doctor to the Galaxy (1965); The Galactic Troubadours (1965); The Space Plague (1966); The Space Olympics (1967); The Thursday Toads (1971); Star Dog (1973); Gods or Demons? (1973); The Space Gypsies (1974); Star Circus (1977).See also: CHILDREN'S SF. LIMITED EDITIONS SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS. LINAWEAVER, BRAD (1952- ) US writer who came to general notice with his first novel, Moon of Ice (1982 AMZ; exp 1988), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD where a Nazi-controlled Europe and a freedom-loving USA confront each other in a nuclear standoff ( HITLER WINS). The original novella (itself revised in 1986) conveys considerable impact in its description of the confrontation between the supremely pragmatic and practical Joseph Goebbels and a mystical inner circle of the SS which plans to replace humanity by Ubermenschen. The novel, which also contains the story of Goebbels's daughter's life as an anarchist revolutionary and the portrait of an explicitly LIBERTARIAN US citizen, adds little to the original. [NT] LINCOLN, MAURICE Pseudonym of a UK writer, apparently born in 1887, whose two sf novels display an uneasy bantering tone and slyly cluttered plots which make his or her identification of some potential interest. In Nothing Ever Happens (1927) two young UK men are transported to an unlocatable island run by an impossibly old Master - it is possible T.H. WHITE's similar The Master (1957) owes some debt to this book - where they are induced to breed with his daughters and discover that he himself breeds ANDROIDS. In The Man from Up There (1929) a similar duo discovers - and attempts to profit from - a Cyclopean giant from the Moon, whose arrival on Earth has stopped all radio transmissions for days. Eventually the giant goes home. [JC] LINDBOHM, DENIS [r] SCANDINAVIA. LINDGREEN, JORGEN [r] DENMARK. LINDHOLM, MEGAN Pseudonym of US writer Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden (1952- ) who began publishing short stories for children in her late teens, and whose first work of genre interest was "Bones for Dulath" in Amazons (anth 1979) ed Jessica Amando Salmonson, and the characters from which featured in her first novel, Harpy's Flight (1984), itself the first volume of the Windsingers fantasy sequence, whose further instalments are The Windsingers (1984) and The Limbreth Gate (1984), all 3 volumes being assembled as The Windsingers (omni 1985 UK); plus Luck of the Wheels (1989). Almost all her 1980s work is fantasy (see Other Works below), most outstandingly perhaps in Wizard of the Pigeons (1986). Alien Earth (1992), however, is sf, set initially in what may resembles a GENERATION STARSHIP environment, though the ship turns out in fact to be sentient and under the control of an alien boss. Humans are cargo, but the protagonists begin to make revolutionary discovers about themselves, and their home planet, which they must reinvigorate. ML also writes as Robin Hobb. [JC]Other Works: the Reindeer People sequence, comprising The Reindeer People (1988) and Wolf's Brother (1988), both assembled as A Saga of the Reindeer People (omni 1989); Cloven Hooves (1991); The Gypsy (1992) with Stephen BRUST; Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man (1989 IASFM; 1994 chap); Assassin's Apprentice (1995) as by Robin Hobb. LINDNER, ROBERT (MITCHELL) (1914-1956) US psychoanalyst and prison psychologist who reported on his work in the latter capacity in Rebel Without a Cause (1944). "The Jet-Propelled Couch", a long narrative essay which appears in The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (coll 1955; vt The Jet-Propelled Couch UK), absorbingly examines and analyses the sf-based fantasies of one of his patients, who retreated from an intolerable childhood, adolescence and adulthood through progressive immersion in an elaborate SPACE-OPERA universe, to which he believed he was regularly transported and in which he was the ruler of a planet. His rationalization of his role in this universe was impeccably couched in sf terms, with alternate time-streams playing a considerable role, and provides an explanation in extremis for sf's imaginative power over adolescents. Also of interest is one effect of RL's curative strategy: he pretended to enter into his patient's universe with him, and eventually was himself fascinated and almost ensnared by it. Roger ZELAZNY's THE DREAM MASTER (1966) develops the implications of RL's experience in bravura fashion. [JC]See also: PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY. LINDSAY, DAVID (1876-1945) UK writer remembered today almost entirely for his first novel, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), in which he rather high-handedly makes use of a range of sf and fantasy devices to transport a man to the planet Tormance, where he is destined to undergo a series of baroque adventures. In fact the journey to this planet is a mystical inner passage into a state where ethical precepts, and all the other slings and arrows to which the protagonist's soul is vulnerable, are embodied in the extraordinary Tormance lifeforms. The metaphysic thus unfolded is of a compelling ornateness, and may - it has been suggested - have inspired C.S. LEWIS's Cosmic Trilogy. The Haunted Woman (1922) is a more conventional FANTASY in which a similarly allegorical reading of the Ocean of Story is constantly underlined. The Adventures of M. de Mailly (1926; vt A Blade for Sale 1927 US) is a historical novel, while Sphinx (1923), Devil's Tor (1932) and The Violet Apple & The Witch (coll 1975 US) are all fantasies. The Violet Apple (1978) contains only the first tale. [JC]About the author: The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (anth 1970) by J.B. Pick, E.H. VISIAK and Colin WILSON; David Lindsay (1982 chap) by Gary K. WOLFE.See also: CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; DIME-NOVEL SF; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GODS AND DEMONS; HISTORY OF SF; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; MYTHOLOGY; PERCEPTION. LINDSAY, RICHARD [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. LINDSAY, (NICHOLAS) VACHEL (1879-1931) US poet, the clanging primitivism of whose best known work, the poems assembled in The Congo and Other Poems (coll 1914), may have been ingenuous. Of sf interest is The Golden Book of Springfield, being the Review of a Book that will Appear in the Autumn of the year 2018, and an Extended Description of Springfield, Illinois, in that Year (1920), a prose work in which a world government is envisioned. [JC] LINGUISTICS Linguistics is the study of language, how languages work, what their function is, how they are constructed and whence they are derived. As a discipline it has leapt to academic prominence since the 1960s. Languages play a surprisingly important role in sf, and many stories turn on linguistic issues. The theme overlaps, naturally, with that of COMMUNICATIONS, and also to some extent with those of ANTHROPOLOGY and PERCEPTION, inasmuch as a language tells us a great deal about the culture that uses it and the way that culture perceives the world. This entry concentrates primarily on verbal languages in sf. Other ways of giving information are dealt with under COMMUNICATIONS, and two examples will suffice here. Terry CARR's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (1968) is set on an alien planet whose natives are energy forms; their language is dancing; for no clear reason they destroy many humans for whom they seem to feel no enmity, and survival depends on the correct reading of the dance. John VARLEY invents a nonverbal linguistic UTOPIA in the 1978 title story of THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION (coll 1978), in which a sighted man enters a community of people who are blind and deaf; they communicate through touch (and sex) in a language more subtle and immediate than he can at first grasp.Much earlier C.S. LEWIS and J.R.R. TOLKIEN both used their considerable philological expertise in their fictions. The former's OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) speaks interestingly of the different grammars and vocabularies of the three Martian languages, and plays some rather facile linguistic tricks to show up what Lewis regarded as the arrogance of humanistic SCIENTISTS. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (3 vols 1954-5; omni 1968) is unusual in that its very genesis was largely linguistic: Tolkien invented his imaginary languages (carefully glossed and explained in the many appendices) before he wrote the books. If we accept linguistics as a science - it is arguably the "hardest" (or "most scientific") of the SOFT SCIENCES-then we might argue that the fiction of Tolkien, usually regarded as FANTASY, at least approaches sf in its linguistic aspects.Sf stories in which linguistics plays a subsidiary role are very much more common than sf stories actually about linguistics. Most writers who set stories in the future (or in the past, if it comes to that) ignore the problem of language-change, but some have confronted the problem, with various degrees of success; many of these attempts are discussed by Walter E. MEYERS in what is by far the best study of the topic, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980). Although sf writers normally realize that their craft requires a good understanding of the hard sciences (physics, etc.), many have no training in nor understanding of linguistics; and nor, very often, do they seem to feel this as a lack. Thus stories turning on points of ALIEN or future language are often patchy; the ways in which grammar, vocabulary and speech-sounds evolve do not seem to be widely understood.Examples of sf stories demonstrating linguistic change, whether fanciful or plausible, are: Alfred BESTER's "Of Time and Third Avenue" (1951), Bester being generally very much alive to the forms of language; Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Gulf" (1949), with its future speedtalk; Anthony BURGESS's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1962), with its NEAR-FUTURE Russian-derived Nadsat slang; George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), with its Newspeak, designed to reinforce "proper" social attitudes; Poul ANDERSON's "Time Heals" (1949), with a futurified pronunciation; Felix C. GOTSCHALK's Growing Up in Tier 3000 (1975), where a great variety of future colloquialisms are evoked; and Michael FRAYN's A Very Private Life (1968), whose future languages are more lively than plausible. A more generalized linguistic gusto is displayed in, for example, Benjamin APPEL's The Funhouse (1959), Arthur Byron COVER's Autumn Angels (1975) and much of the output of R.A. LAFFERTY.A GENRE-SF writer who is always aware of linguistic problems is L. Sprague DE CAMP; his article "Language for Time Travelers" (1938) - similar material is incorporated into his Science-Fiction Handbook (1953; rev 1975) - was probably the first account of linguistic problems in sf. His stories, sometimes rather ploddingly, reflect this interest, as in "The Wheels of If" (1940), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD where the Norman Conquest did not take place and so English has never been Frenchified (although here De Camp gets Grimm's Law of sound-changes quite wrong, in terms of both its effect and the historical period to which it refers), and in the Viagens Interplanetarias series, in which the space pidgin Intermundos is heavily influenced by Brazilian space crews.Orwell's Newspeak, although the most celebrated example of language-control being used by the state to impose social conformity and an unthinking acceptance of the way things are, was by no means the first. Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's We (trans 1924) has a heavily conformist, mechanical language that reflects the regimentation of society. Anthony BOUCHER's interesting TIME-TRAVEL story "Barrier" (1942) likewise features such a language, along with a daffy collocation of future linguists all researching via TIME MACHINES. A tour de force of conformist-language creation is the story told by the Ascian prisoner-of-war in Gene WOLFE's The Citadel of the Autarch (1983), expressing entirely in patriotic slogans a tale of the individual spirit. The whole of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, indeed, is alive with linguistic invention, not least in its use of words from the classical Greek to express concepts at once futuristic and archaic.Language is an important aspect of the above stories, but is not their raison d'etre. Three kinds of story in which linguistics becomes central are those where humans communicate with animals (1) or with aliens (2), or endeavour to translate dead alien languages (3).Two good examples in the first group are Un animal doue de raison (1967; trans as The Day of the Dolphin 1969) by Robert MERLE and Slave Ship by Frederik POHL, in both of which animals who must be spoken to are used as military weapons. Ursula K. LE GUIN's amusing spoof scientific paper, based on the idea that animals and insects have not only languages but also artforms, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from The Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" (1974), is probably not intended entirely as a joke. Many stories other than Merle's have looked at cetacean-human communication, a subject popularized from 1961 in a series of nonfiction books by the experimental psychologist John C. Lilly. Among such stories are those in David BRIN's Uplift War sequence, particularly STARTIDE RISING (1983; rev 1985), whose advanced dolphins have undergone GENETIC ENGINEERING, and Ted MOONEY's Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), in which a love story between woman and dolphin, to which linguistic questions are central, takes place against a backdrop of global Information Sickness.First Contact stories ( ALIENS; ANTHROPOLOGY) necessarily involve linguistics unless, as once was frequent, the issue is dodged by the use of some kind of magical translation box. However, there are many such stories that do involve linguistic questions, notably including the series about galactic intelligence agent Coyote Jones by Suzette Haden ELGIN, who spent a decade as a professor of linguistics. John BERRYMAN's "Berom" (1951) has an amusing variant on the theme, in which incomprehensible visiting aliens turn out to be speaking in a UK commercial cable code of the 1920s that they have picked up by radio. The Hoka series by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. DICKSON features aliens who understand language quite literally, with sometimes comic results. Frank HERBERT's Whipping Star (1970) conjures up, in a story of humans making contact with aliens who turn out to be STARS, so intense a miasma of semantic confusions (as recurs regularly in his work) that the narrative structure and human interest of the story are very nearly overwhelmed. Roger ZELAZNY's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963), a verbally brilliant story with a depth of feeling seldom found in sf, has a poet-linguist chosen to attempt contact with the few remaining Martians, and to translate their high language and their holy texts; his complacency is punctured. Chad OLIVER's The Winds of Time (1957) has some expertly worked-out descriptive field linguistics in operation in a story of interstellar aliens waking from SUSPENDED ANIMATION on Earth. Edward LLEWELLYN's Word-Bringer (1986) is another First Contact story (about an alien ROBOT emissary to Earth) with linguistic ramifications. The film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) ends with a prolonged epiphany when the occupants of a flying saucer () finally consent to make contact, communication being initiated through a linguistic code of flickering lights and a sequence of crashing chords. Another film, ICEMAN (1984), has a prolongedly earnest linguistic sequence about attempted contact with a resuscitated Neanderthal ( APES AND CAVEMEN). David I. MASSON, a devoted student of linguistics, may have written the First Contact story with the best-informed linguistic detail in "Not So Certain" (1967), which shows one kind of problem that may bedevil the most well intentioned exo-culture specialists. This was republished in his The Caltraps of Time (coll 1968), which also contains the amusing "A Two-Timer" (1966), in which an inadvertent time traveller from the 17th century describes in his own English what he finds in the 20th - not least, semantic bafflement.Stories of archaeological linguistics are less common. H. Beam PIPER's "Omnilingual" (1957), probably his best story, has a woman seeking a Rosetta Stone with which to interpret the writings of a dead Martian civilization; she ultimately finds it in the periodic table of the elements.Other sf works focusing strongly on linguistics include Hunter of Worlds (1977) by C.J. CHERRYH, herself a linguist; and the Cuckoo series - The Farthest Star (fixup 1975) and Wall Around a Star (1983) - by Frederik Pohl and Jack WILLIAMSON. These are recent and quite sophisticated, but one of the best sf books about linguistic problems was much earlier: Jack VANCE's The Languages of Pao (1958) is one of the most intelligent uses in genre sf of the idea that the perception of reality by different races is reflected in, and to a degree actually determined by, the languages they speak; hence CULTURAL ENGINEERING can be carried out by the teaching of new languages. In real-life linguistics this view is strongly identified with the writings of Dr Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) in his studies of Native American languages. Whorf's theories of linguistic relativity are most obviously reflected in sf terms in Samuel R. DELANY's BABEL-17 (1966), a complexly structured novel about communication which takes language itself as the central image; a web of different languages is threaded through the spy-story plot, in which an alien code turns out to be only paradoxically alien. It is Babel-17, a perfect analytical language which has no word for "I"; this absence Delany sees as its strength and also its weakness. (Meyers, in his book cited above, admonishes Delany for not then knowing as much about linguistics as the confident tone of BABEL-17 might suggest.) Delany's interest in language and linguistic philosophy has continued, and is reflected in much of his work, including the curious dialects he created in NOVA (1968) and also his critical book, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (coll 1977).The use of linguistic devices in the actual telling of a story, to reflect along Whorfian lines the nature of the human or alien cultures described, is a difficult narrative skill. Suzette Haden Elgin attempts it only occasionally in her series Native Tongue (1984) and The Judas Rose (1987), but there is considerable interest in her account of the creation of the secret language Womanspeak (or "La'Adan") used by a disempowered female underclass as one weapon in their struggle to subvert the self-satisfied world of men. The film MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), a post- HOLOCAUST exploitation thriller, is the last place one might have expected to find a linguistic thesis, but the devolved language of an isolated community of children is presented with considerable imagination (and a not inconsiderable beauty). The linguistic tour de force of the 1980s, however, was RIDDLEY WALKER (1980) by Russell HOBAN, a story of a post-holocaust England actually told in the devolved but vivid language of its inhabitants; the astonishing thing is not so much the attempt - many sf writers have done the same thing on a smaller scale - but its success at novel length. Other sf writers may have had much to say about linguistic concepts, but none has ever so sustainedly shown such a language in action, nor so successfully - and movingly - revealed the culture of its speakers in so doing.If Whorf has been the one powerful influence on sf linguistic scenarios, another may come to be Noam Chomsky (1928- ), whose view that all human languages share a deep structure which is perhaps genetically determined is to some extent at odds with Whorf's view that our conceptual categorization of the world is determined by our native language; where Whorf stressed diversity, Chomsky stresses unity. Sf had added little to this debate, nor seemed very conscious of it, until 1973, when the ideationally exuberant Ian WATSON first attracted the attention of the sf readership. Most of his novels feature linguistic thought somewhere in their usually complex structure, and his first, THE EMBEDDING (1973), is certainly the sf linguistics novel par excellence, with all three of its subplots linking language and PERCEPTION in interweaving stories of alien, South American Indian and computer-imposed languages, and the differing subjective realities they may or may not succeed in generating. An important essay by Watson is "Towards an Alien Linguistics" (1975 Vector), reprinted in The Book of Ian Watson (coll 1985 US), in which he considers questions of epistemology and hazards the thought that there may be "a topological grammar of the universe, which reflects itself in the grammars of actual languages" - Chomsky writ very large indeed. Watson is one of those theorists who have used arguments from quantum mechanics to support the solipsistic view that the Universe exists as an external structure only through the consciousnesses of its participants and observers; language, in Watson's scheme, is reflexive, Nature sending a message to itself - an intellectual position that, if correct, would place linguistics as the scientific discipline right at the heart of sf. [PN]Further reading: Aside from those cited above, two useful texts about linguistics in sf are Linguistics and Language in Science Fiction-Fantasy (1975) by Myra Edwards BARNES and an interesting essay on the popular subject of word-coinage by sf writers, "The Words in Science Fiction" by Larry NIVEN in The Craft of Science Fiction (anth 1976) ed Reginald BRETNOR. LINKLATER, ERIC (ROBERT RUSSELL) (1899-1974) Scottish writer proficient in various genres though best remembered for his novels, beginning with White Maa's Saga (1929). Much of his work is fantasy, like The Devil's in the News (1934) and many of the stories collected in God Likes them Plain (coll 1935), Sealskin Trousers (coll 1947) and A Sociable Plover (coll 1957). The Impregnable Women (1938) is a NEAR-FUTURE rewrite of Lysistrata in which the women of Europe band together, go on sexual strike, and end a futile war ( WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION). Similar in attitude were EL's WWII conversation plays, notably The Raft and Socrates Asks Why (1942 chap), The Great Ship and Rabelais Replies (1944 chap) and Crisis in Heaven: An Elysian Comedy (1944 chap), which employed fantasy elements as didactic pointers. His two children's novels, The Wind on the Moon (1944) and The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949), are both attractive fantasies, in the latter of which Davy Jones and all the drowned pirates under the sea are discovered guarding the great knots that tie latitudes and longitudes together to keep the world from splitting. A Spell for Old Bones (1949) is a fantasy set in a mythical 1st-century Scotland. In A Terrible Freedom (1966) a man finds the characters of his dream world taking over the real one. [JC]See also: The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION . LIN YUTANG Working name of Chinese-US novelist, essayist and academic Lin Yu-t'ang (1895-1976). In The Unexpected Island (1955 UK; vt Looking Beyond 1955 US) refugees from several world HOLOCAUSTS establish a conservative UTOPIA on an isolated ISLAND. [JC] LIONEL, ROBERT R.L. FANTHORPE. LIPPINCOTT, DAVID (McCORD) (1925-1984) US writer and advertising executive whose NEAR-FUTURE political thriller E Pluribus Bang! (1970) finds the US President involved in the murder of a Secret Service agent he finds in bed with his wife. Tremor Violet (1975) is a DISASTER novel about earthquakes in Los Angeles. [JC]Other works: Voice of Armageddon (1974); The Blood of October (1977); Black Prism (1980 UK; vt Dark Prism 1981 US). LIQUID SKY Film (1982). Z Films. Dir Slava Tsukerman, starring Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, Otto von Wernherr. Screenplay Tsukerman, Carlisle, Nina V. Kerova. 112 mins. Colour. ALIENS who have landed their tiny flying saucer on the roof of a Manhattan penthouse observe the lives of strange young people: fashionable, drug-using, white-faced Punk/New Wavers. The aliens are attracted to chemicals released when humans use heroin ("liquid sky") and/or achieve orgasm, killing the humans or causing them to disappear at the moment of endorphin saturation. When looking through alien eyes we see this in psychedelic patterns. This elegant, sometimes funny, sometimes obscene art film, something of an anthropological documentary about an alienated, self-brutalized human subculture, was made by a group of Russian emigres in New York - effectively aliens themselves - and features a German (that is, alien) alien-hunter.The novelization is Liquid Sky * (1987) by Anne Carlisle (1956- ). [PN]See also: SEX. LISLE, SEWARD D. Edward S. ELLIS. LITTELL, JONATHAN (?1969- ) US writer whose Bad Voltage: A Fantasy in 4/4 (1989) depicts a CYBERPUNK Paris with confused verve. The young protagonist (he is Black; the first edition's cover shows him White) moves from underground criminal activities to the upper world of the rich, which mirrors the lower. The energies of the book are expended scattershot, but attractively. [JC] LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, THE Roger CORMAN. LI TUNG [r] LEE TUNG. LIVIA, ANNA [r] ANNA LIVIA. LIVINGSTON, BERKELEY (1908-1975) US writer whose sf appeared only in the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines AMZ and Fantastic Adventures. Some 50 stories appeared 1943-50, under either his own name or the house names Alexander BLADE and Morris J. Steele. His only book was Meteor of Death (1954 chap Australia). He is noted for the quantity rather than the quality of his work. [JE/PN]See also: ILLUSTRATION; LEISURE. LIVINGSTON, HAROLD (1924- ) US writer, often of tv scripts, whose fourth book, The Climacticon (1960), spoofs SEX obsessions in a borderline-sf tale. [JC] LIVING WORLDS The notion that a planet might be a living creature is a rather startling one; indeed, it was initially used purely for its shock value. In R.A. KENNEDY's remarkable philosophical extravaganza The Triuneverse (1912), MARS begins to reproduce by binary fission and its daughter cells devour much of the Solar System. In "When the World Screamed" (1929) by Arthur Conan DOYLE a hole is drilled through the Earth's "skin" and the living flesh within reacts against the violation. Other attempts to exploit this shock value include Edmond HAMILTON's "The Earth-Brain" (1932), Jack WILLIAMSON's "Born of the Sun" (1934) - in which the Sun is living, the planets are its eggs, and Earth hatches - and Nelson BOND's "And Lo! The Bird" (1950). The perishability of easy shock value inevitably gives rise to an escalation of scale; Laurence MANNING soon took the idea to its extreme in "The Living Galaxy" (1934).The notion of living STARS seems to fascinate sf writers more than that of living planets. Austere stellar intelligences are featured in STAR MAKER (1937) by Olaf STAPLEDON, though Stapledon discarded a first draft which featured the exploits of intelligent nebulae; it was later published as Nebula Maker (1976). (An intelligent nebula, albeit a very small one, figures also in Fred HOYLE's The Black Cloud, 1957.) There are vestiges here of the occasional medieval equation of stars and angels, seen also in William Blake's poem "The Tiger" (1794). More recent examples of living stars are found in Gerard KLEIN's Starmaster's Gambit (1958; trans 1973), Frederik POHL's and Jack Williamson's Starchild (1965) and Rogue Star (1969), Frank HERBERT's Whipping Star (1970) and If The Stars are Gods (fixup 1977) by Gregory BENFORD and Gordon EKLUND. Living planets have become rare, although visiting spacemen offend one in Ray BRADBURY's "Here There Be Tygers" (1951), but planets whose whole ecospheres are single individuals, often imbued with consciousness, are not uncommon. The planetary spirits in the Cosmic Trilogy (1938-45) by C.S. LEWIS are somewhat rarefied, as are the curious world-consciousnesses featured in Theodore STURGEON's "Case and the Dreamer" (1972) and Neal BARRETT's Stress Pattern (1974), but more mundane life-systems which comprise single vast organisms are featured in such stories as Murray LEINSTER's "The Lonely Planet" (1949), Doris PISERCHIA's Earthchild (1977), M.A. FOSTER's Waves (1980), Brian M. STABLEFORD's "Wildland" (1989) and Isaac ASIMOV's Nemesis (1989). The most popular model for such integrated ecospheres is the forest, displayed in "Process" (1950) by A.E. VAN VOGT, "The Forest of Zil" (1967) by Kris NEVILLE, and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) by Ursula K. LE GUIN. The most impressive presentation of a truly ALIEN world-intelligence is Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970), many features of which are prefigured in his Edem (1959; trans as Eden 1989). The recent popularization of James Lovelock's "Gaia hypothesis" has encouraged writers to pay more attention to highly integrated ecospheres, but the most radical repersonalization of the Earth is that in David BRIN's Earth (1990), in which the planet undergoes metamorphosis into a gargantuan AI - perhaps the most extravagant deus ex machina ever deployed. [BS]See also: BIOLOGY; HIVE-MINDS. LLEWELLYN, (DAVID WILLIAM) ALUN (1903-1988) UK writer active in several genres, including political SATIRE. His sf novel The Strange Invaders (1934), like John COLLIER's Tom's A-Cold (1933), builds upon the deeply felt elegiac mood of Richard JEFFERIES's post- HOLOCAUST novel After London (1885). Set in a new ice age and told in an intensely worked, harsh style, it depicts a tribal society in a future USSR where Marx, Lenin and Stalin are revered as saints in a barbarian religion; the world has, long ago, been nearly destroyed by war. The novel's focus is INVASION by great lizard-like successors to humanity, which the inhabitants of a small settlement finally defeat at great cost. [JC]Other works: Confound their Politics (coll1934), political satires set in imaginary countries; Jubilee John (1939).See also: DISASTER. LLEWELLYN, EDWARD Working name of Welsh-born Canadian writer and doctor Edward Llewellyn-Thomas (1917-1984), who held professorships variously in pharmacology, medicine, electrical engineering and psychology. Most of his work is set loosely in the same universe, with his first 3 novels - The Douglas Convolution (1979 US), The Bright Companion (1980 US) and Prelude to Chaos (1983 US) - constituting a trilogy about a 22nd-century Earth suffering from widespread female infertility. The muscularly told first volume follows the arrival in this world, via TIME TRAVEL, of an ingenious mathematician, who proves invaluable to the Order of fertile women; the second presents a tour of the world dominated by this Order; the third is a weak prequel. In Salvage and Destroy (1984 US) EL moved into SPACE OPERA, though genetics continues to play a role in a complex plot involving two immortal species of aliens, one of which becomes involved with Earth. Fugitive in Transit (1985 US) similarly confronts humans with representatives of galactic civilization, in this case the Galactic Transit Authority, which is chasing the woman who has discovered a stargate. Word-Bringer (1986) presents its protagonist with the discovery - familiar to readers of Clifford D. SIMAK - that aliens have left on Earth a device which spreads knowledge for free, engendering all sorts of scientific advances. Though he did not seem destined to become a major writer in the field, EL's tales are literate, numerate and attractively marked by their frequent use of active and personable WOMEN as protagonists. [JC]See also: CANADA; ESP; LINGUISTICS. LLOYD, JOHN URI (1849-1936) US chemist, author of Etidorhpa, or The End of Earth (1895; rev 1901), a metaphysical FANTASTIC VOYAGE in which the narrator is led by a blind humanoid to a LOST WORLD in the interior of the Earth, where he gains occult enlightenment into the higher forms of love (the title is Aphrodite reversed). Etidorhpa, which went through at least 11 editions, is noteworthy for its bitter attack on the rational sciences. Like other notable HOLLOW-EARTH works of the period, it derives from the theories of John Cleves SYMMES. [JE/JC] LOBATO, MONTEIRO [r] LATIN AMERICA. LOCKE, GEORGE (WALTER) (1936- ) UK writer, one-time pharmacist, antiquarian bookseller and bibliographer. He began publishing sf with "The Human Seed" for Authentic in 1957, and under the name Gordon Walters published a number of sf stories in the 1960s, but no sf books; his novels, Pattern of Terror (1987) and A Spectre-Room of Fancy (1989 chap) as by Ayresome Johns, are detective tales of "impossible crimes" and the supernatural. His most important publications have been in the BIBLIOGRAPHY of sf and fantasy; though his researches have been far-ranging, the emphasis has been on 19th-century interplanetary romances, which he annotated in Voyages in Space: A Bibliography of Interplanetary Fiction, 1801-1914 (1975 chap). Ferret Fantasy's Christmas Annual for 1972 (1972 chap), Ferret Fantasy's Christmas Annual for 1973 (1974 chap) and Ferret Fantasy's Christmas Annual for 1974 (1975 chap), which contains inter alia short bibliographies of this material, led to the excellent Science Fiction First Editions: A Select Bibliography and Notes for the Collector (1978 chap). A Spectrum of Fantasy: The Bibliography and Biography of a Collection of Fantastic Literature (1980), and A Spectrum of Fantasy II: Acquisitions to a Collection of Fantastic Literature, 1980-1993 (1994), applied the same combination of bibliographic exactitude and anecdotal commentary to a description of his own extremely large library. Many books not previously understood to merit admission to the canon of sf and fantasy were first cited in these volumes. His SMALL PRESS, Ferret Fantasy, has so far issued 15 books of sf, fantasy and mystery interest. [JC]Other works: Worlds Apart (anth 1972), ed, early interplanetary fiction in facsimile; At the Mountains of Murkiness and Other Parodies (anth 1973), ed anon; From an Ultimate Dim Thule (1973), a study of fantasy illustrator Sidney H. Sime, and The Land of Dreams (1975), an illustrated survey of Sime; The Affair of the Lost Compression and Other Stories (anth 1975 chap); Guardians of the Lilac Moon, or The Downfall of Dakeevle the Dire (1980 chap), a tale for children; Thirty Years of Dustwrappers: 1884-1914 (1988 chap); Pearson's Weekly: A Checklist of Fiction 1890-1939 (1990). LOCKE, RICHARD ADAMS (1800-1871) US journalist and editor, usually regarded as author of the famous "Moon Hoax". In 1835 several issues of the New York Sun carried articles purporting to describe the inhabitants of the MOON and their environs as observed by the distinguished astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) through a new, high-magnification telescope. It remains unclear which of several variously titled chapbook versions of the original hoax is in fact the original edition. Title variations include Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope and A Complete Account of the Late Discoveries in the Moon (both 1835 chap; under first title rev 1841; rev vt The Moon Hoax, or A Discovery that the Moon has a Vast Population of Human Beings 1859 US; vt The Great Moon Hoax of Richard Adams Locke 1886). The book has also been dubiously ascribed to Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, but the consensus is that the work was indeed RAL's. The effectiveness of the hoax was comparable to the reactions to Edgar Allan POE's "Balloon Hoax" (1844 New York Sun), which was purchased for the paper by RAL, then one of its editors, and the Orson Welles broadcast of The WAR OF THE WORLDS (1938). The Moon Hoax, or A Discovery that the Moon has a Vast Population of Human Beings (anth 1859; exp with new intro by Ormond Seavey 1975) presents the original text plus later material. [JE]See also: ASTRONOMY. LOCKHARD, LEONARD [s] Charles L. HARNESS; Theodore L. THOMAS. LOCUS US SEMIPROZINE, 1968-current, ed Charles N. BROWN (calling himself Charlie Brown in earlier days), published by Locus Publications (in Oakland, California, since the 1970s), 412 issues to May 1995. Locus was founded in New York by Brown with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf as a one-sheet news FANZINE; when Brown's partners dropped out, his then wife Marsha Brown joined him as co-editor. At that time the magazine appeared between fortnightly and monthly. Brown divorced, became sole editor, remarried in 1970, and his new wife Dena Brown became the new co-editor. Locus (and the Browns) moved to the San Francisco area in 1972, a year after winning its first of many Best Fanzine HUGOS.In 1976 Charles Brown gave up his job as an electrical engineer and began to edit Locus full-time (Dena Brown had worked full-time on it 1972-5). He divorced again in 1977, and since then has been sole editor; the magazine effectively became a semiprozine at this point, since Brown was attempting to earn a living from it alone; the first paid employee was hired in 1977. During the 1970s the newsletter became a monthly, increased in size, and began (from 1974) listing all sf books published in the USA. By 1980 the circulation had topped 5000, reaching 7000 in 1984. In 1983 it increased to 48pp an issue and switched to computer setting; it became fully desk-top published with laser typesetting from 1986.By the 1990s Locus (74pp as of June 1992 and varying between 70pp to 86pp more recently) had long been established as the trade newspaper of sf; its paid circulation has varied around 8,100-8,700 between 1988 and 1994, falling off slightly from the high of 1990. Its clear superiority over all other news magazines in the field has been confirmed by the astonishing number of Hugos (17) it has now received: eight for Best Fanzine to 1983, and a further nine 1984-1992 for Best Semiprozine; i.e., a Hugo for the first nine years in which the latter category has been in existence. The predictability of Locus's annual Hugo, which had proved irritating to some in the sf world, proved illusory when SCIENCE FICTION COMMENTARY won in this category in 1993 and 1994. Wholly professional in appearance, Locus excels in its news coverage (with regular columns from overseas, including the UK and much of Europe, Australia, Russia, China and occasionally various Latin American countries). Its book-review coverage is very ample, taking up a large proportion of the magazine. Brown's policy of not printing strongly adverse reviews, while understandable in view of the magazine's reliance on the book trade for advertising, is unfortunate. The policy matters less in practice than in theory, since most reviews are intelligent and well informed, although some readers find them somewhat bland overall. Nonetheless, Locus is indispensable for professionals in the sf field, and was one of the most important references used in the compilation of this encyclopedia. Locus polls its readers annually about their favourites in different categories of sf publishing ( AWARDS), and there is a case for arguing that the Locus Awards are more securely based across the sf readership than are the more celebrated Hugos. Locus also surveys annually its subscribers' ages, occupations, reading habits, etc. Locus Publications also publishes books (for further details of which Charles N. BROWN and William CONTENTO). [PN] LOCUS AWARDS AWARDS. LOFTING, HUGH [r] CHILDREN'S SF. LOGAN, CHARLES (1930- ) UK writer, and nurse for the mentally handicapped. Shipwreck (1975) won the 1975 Gollancz/Sunday Times sf contest jointly with Chris BOYCE's Catchworld (1975). Calmly and inexorably, it tells the story of the inevitable death of a man whose spaceship lands disabled on a planet whose ECOLOGY is unfriendly to human survival. That this grim anti- ROBINSONADE presents the most likely outcome of such an occurrence has not made it any more popular with sf fans. [JC] LOGAN'S RUN 1. Film (1976). MGM/United Artists. Dir Michael Anderson, starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov, Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Screenplay David Zelag Goodman, based on Logan's Run (1967) by William F. NOLAN and George Clayton JOHNSON. 118 Mins. Colour.One of the largest, most "prestigious" sf films of the decade, this was also one of the most sluggish, reducing its lively source, Nolan's and Johnson's novel, to a bland affair whose lavishness is all decoration, no substance. Set in a domed city where no one is allowed to pass their 30th birthday - official killers, "Sandmen", disposing of those who refuse their ritual suicide - the film concerns a renegade Sandman and his girlfriend, who attempt to reach the legendary "Sanctuary" outside. But Sanctuary does not exist; instead they find a mildewed Washington DC, inhabited by the only living old man. They decide that old age is a good thing and return to the dome to spread the news. During interrogation, the reformed Sandman confuses the city COMPUTER to the point where it blows itself up, along with the city.LR's youth autocracy exists in a conceptual vacuum and is riddled with contradiction, and the film's attack on its sterile UTOPIA is - typically of much patronizing sf cinema of the period - simplistic to the point of banality. There are livelier film versions of the theme, one being GAS-S-S-S (1970).2. US tv series (1977-8), based on the film. An MGM TV Production for CBS. Prod Ben Roberts, Ivan Goff. Executive prod Leonard Katzman. Story editor D.C. FONTANA. Writers included Fontana, Saul David, Harlan ELLISON. Dirs included Paul Krasny, Curtis Harrington. 1 season, 75min pilot plus 13 50min episodes. Colour.The two men who created and produced the popular crime-busting programme Charlie's Angels - both admitted they knew nothing about sf - made this short-lived tv series designed to exploit the film. For budgetary reasons the series was set outside the film's domed city. It concerns the adventures of Logan (Gregory Harrison), Jessica (Heather Menzies) and Rem (Donald Moffat), the latter - a comic ANDROID with nonbiological components - having been hastily introduced to exploit the popularity of the two ROBOTS in STAR WARS (1977). These three characters search for Sanctuary while pursued by deadly Sandmen from the city, moving from one DYSTOPIAN situation to another, all this portrayed at the level of comic-book stereotype. [JB/PN] LOGGEM, MANUEL van [r] BENELUX. LOGSDON, SYD (?1950- ) US writer whose first sf novel, Jandrax (1979), is a PLANETARY ROMANCE about a sexually active scout who is also tough on planets. SL's second, A Fond Farewell to Dying (1978 Gal as "To Not Go Gently"; exp 1981), is a far more interesting post- HOLOCAUST tale set in 23rd-century India. A longstanding conflict with a Muslim nation to the north frames the humanly complex story of a Westerner's research into cloning ( CLONES) to compensate for the post-nuclear sterilization suffered by most of the world. The sense that cloning barbarously parodies Hindu beliefs in REINCARNATION permeates the text, whose very considerable competence makes SL's subsequent silence all the more regrettable. [JC] LOHRMAN, PAUL House name used on the ZIFF-DAVIS magazines by Richard SHAVER, Paul W. FAIRMAN and perhaps others on 7 stories 1950-53. "The World of the Lost" (Fantastic Adventures 1950) has been definitely attributed to Shaver. [PN] LOIS & CLARK: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN US tv series (1993- ). December 3rd Productions/Warner Bros. Developed for television by DeborahJoy LeVine. Exec prods David Jacobs, Robert Singer; co-exec prods Deborah Joy LeVine, Jim Crocker; co-prods Philip J. Sgriucia, Jim Michaels, John McNamara; supervising prods Randall Zisk, Tony Blake & Paul Jackson.Two-hour pilot Sep 1993 written by LeVine and dir Robert Butler. Other writers include Crocker, Bryce Zabel, Robert Killebrew, Thania St. John, Dan Levine; other directors include Zisk, Gene Reynolds, Mark Sobel, Robert Singer, James R. Bagdonas. Starring Dean Cain as Clark Kent and Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane; also starring Lane Smith as Perry White, Michael Landes (first season) and Justin Whalen (second season) as Jimmy Olsen, Tracy Scoggins as Cat Grant, K Callan as Martha Kent, Eddie Jones as Jonathan Kent and John Shea as Lex Luthor. Two seasons to date, 1993-1995, one-hour episodes, colour.This is the third live-action tv spin-off from the comic SUPERMAN, the first being The Adventures of Superman (1953-7), and the second being SUPERBOY (1988-91). This is not a particularly revisionist version except perhaps for Superman's outfit being made by his mother. In a formulaic manner each week sees Superman battling against a villain (often a superscientist of some sort), and normally an sf element such as invisibility or a cyborg criminal. The main ongoing suspense is provided, traditionally enough, by the never quite consummated love triangle between Clark Kent, Lois Lane (Hatcher is beautiful but waspish) and Clark's alter ego Superman. The series, which appears slanted towards a teenage audience, has enjoyed mild success in the ratings, and in the US is screened on the ABC network. [PN] LONDON, JACK Working name of US writer John Griffith London (1876-1916), known primarily for his work outside the sf field. After leaving school at the age of 14, JL spent 7 years of adventure and hardship as an oyster pirate, sailor, hobo, prisoner and Klondike gold-seeker. During this period, he gave himself an education steeped in the most influential scientific and philosophic theories of the late 19th century - Darwinism ( EVOLUTION; SOCIAL DARWINISM), Nietzscheism and Marxism ( ECONOMICS; POLITICS) - which he was to amalgamate in his voluminous writings. These writings consist of adventure tales, socialist essays and fiction, autobiographical narratives, and about 20 works of sf, including 4 novels.His first sf story, "A Thousand Deaths" (1899), combines some key themes of 19th-century sf: a cold-hearted lone SCIENTIST uses his own son in revivification experiments and is then dematerialized by a superweapon invented by the son. "The Rejuvenation of Major Rathbone" (1899) displays a "rejuvenator" extracted from a "lymph compound". "The Shadow and the Flash" (1903) has two competing scientific geniuses attaining INVISIBILITY, one by perfecting a pigment that absorbs all light, the other by achieving pure transparency. In "The Enemy of All the World" (1908) a lone genius invents a superweapon and terrorizes the world. Racism runs through much of JL's sf, most shockingly in "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910): after the White nations have wiped out the Chinese with an aerial germ-warfare assault, a joyous epoch can begin of "splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output". One major area of JL's sf is the prehistoric world ( ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN), which is explored in Before Adam (1906), his first sf novel - which uses a favourite theme, atavism, as a device to project a consciousness into the past - as well as in "The Strength of the Strong" (1911). Atavism appears also in "When the World was Young" (1910), in which a "magnificent" and "yellow-haired" savage shares the body of a successful California businessman, and in The Star Rover (1915; vt The Jacket 1915 UK), a novel based partly on the reported revelations of one Ed Morrell, who had experienced a dissociation of mind from body under torture in San Quentin. In The Scarlet Plague (1912 London Magazine; 1914) human history is viewed as cyclical; the post- HOLOCAUST world of the NEAR FUTURE has reverted to primitive tribal existence. The novella "The Red One" (1918) describes a contemporary stone-age society that has turned a mysterious sphere from outer space into the centrepiece of a death cult.Several of JL's sf works deal with the struggle between the capitalist class, trying to establish a fascist oligarchy, and the proletariat, striving for socialism. "A Curious Fragment" (1908), set in the 28th century, shows one of the ruling oligarchs encountering a severed arm bearing a petition from his industrial slaves, though a more optimistic view appears in "Goliah" (1908), in which a "scientific superman" masters the ultimate energy source, Energon, becomes master of the world's fate, and inaugurates a millennium of international socialism; both stories are assembled in Curious Fragments: Jack London's Tales of Fantasy Fiction ed Dale L. Walker (coll 1975). In "The Dream of Debs" (1909) a near-future general strike brings the capitalist class to its knees. JL's finest achievement in sf, and perhaps his masterpiece, is the DYSTOPIAN The Iron Heel (1907), which predicts a 20th-century fascist oligarchy in the USA and recounts, through documents discovered by scholars in the socialist 27th century, the epic revolutionary struggle of the enslaved proletariat.Many of JL's shorter works can be found reprinted in The Science Fiction of Jack London ed Richard Gid Powers (coll 1975), which also has a good introduction. [HBF]About the author: Jack London: A Bibliography (last rev 1973) by H.C. Woodbridge; Jack London (1984 chap) by Gorman Beauchamp.See also: DISASTER; HISTORY OF SF; MEDICINE; PULP MAGAZINES; REINCARNATION; TABOOS. LONG, CHARLES R(USSELL) (1904-1978) US writer whose 2 routine sf novels are Infinite Brain (1957) and The Eternal Man (1964). Both are filled with action, the first on a distant planet, the second on an Earth replete with human and alien immortals. [JC] LONG, DUNCAN (1949- ) US writer and editor of a SURVIVALIST newsletter. His first novel, Anti-Grav Unlimited (1988), features a super-competent tinker/inventor hero ( EDISONADE) who - in a post- HOLOCAUST atmosphere almost perfectly designed to serve as an arena for his exploits - uses his ingenious ANTIGRAVITY device to defeat a corporate cabal. The book is well crafted. [JC] LONG, FRANK BELKNAP (1903-1994) US writer of sf and fantasy whose working life extended from 1924 to the 1980s; he was married to Lyda Belknap LONG. He produced poetry very early, the best of it appearing in A Man from Genoa and Other Poems (coll 1926) and The Goblin Tower (1935), but is most noted for the weird fantasy he wrote from the beginning of his fiction career, publishing his first stories, "The Desert Lich" and "Death Waters" in WEIRD TALES in 1924. Influenced by H.P. LOVECRAFT, who had promoted the acceptance of his first work and who remained a close colleague until his death in 1937, FBL tended to create worlds in his mentor's style with a slender sf base. He frequently told of his friendship, personal and professional, with Lovecraft, and gave additional details in the valuable introduction and running notes to The Early Long (coll 1976), which assembles stories from 1924-44, the period of his prime as a writer of sf and fantasy. The contents of his first ARKHAM HOUSE volume, The Hounds of Tindalos (coll 1946; cut 1963), were variously excerpted as The Dark Beasts (coll 1963) and The Black Druid and Other Stories (coll 1975 UK); these stories represent the cream of his work. A more recent Arkham collection, The Rim of the Unknown (coll 1972), draws from the same prime material.The post-WWII years saw a change of emphasis in FBL's long career, with much more sf being written and published, beginning with John Carstairs: Space Detective (coll of linked stories 1949) which, with "The Ether Robots" (1942) and "The Heavy Man" (1943), formed a series about John Carstairs, detective and biological expert. Most of FBL's sf deals with future-Earth situations, space travel occurring relatively infrequently (Space Station No 1 [1957 dos] occurs off Earth, but the setting is not too distant), though much of his earlier sf featured TIME TRAVEL. Several of his sf books concentrate on INVASION plots in which aliens menace our world, as in Lest Earth be Conquered (1966; vt The Androids 1969 US) and Journey into Darkness (1967); others, like It was the Day of the Robot (1963) and This Strange Tomorrow (1966), depict intrigue-filled future-Earth societies. Some of his later books, like Survival World (1971) and The Night of the Wolf (1972), a HORROR fantasy, are among his better works. FBL has published hundreds of short stories over his career, in addition to those collected in his own books; a proper estimate of his stature will have to take them into account, as well as the more routine sf novels of his later years, which for some time obscured the shorter work for which he will finally be remembered. His full-length study, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (1975), is also of interest. [JC]Other works: Woman from Another Planet (1960); The Mating Center (1961); Mars is my Destination (1962); Three Steps Spaceward (1953 Fantastic Universe as "Little Men of Space"; 1963); The Horror from the Hills (1931 Weird Tales; 1963); Odd Science Fiction (coll 1964; vt The Horror from the Hills 1965 UK, not to be confused with the 1963 US title, which prints the novel only); The Martian Visitors (1964); Mission to a Star (1958 Satellite; 1964); So Dark a Heritage (1966); . . . And Others Shall be Born (1968 dos); The Three Faces of Time (1969); Monster from Out of Time (1970); In Mayan Splendor (coll 1977), poetry; When Chaugnar Wakes (1978 chap), poem; Night Fear (coll 1979) ed Roy TORGESON; Rehearsal Night (1981 chap); Autobiographical Memoir (1985 chap).As Lyda Belknap Long:To the Dark Tower(1969)Fire of the Witches(1971)The Shape of Fear(1971)The Witch Tree(1971)Hour of the Deadly Nightshade(1972)Legacy of Evil(1973)andThe Crucible of Evil(1974)See also: LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); PARALLEL WORLDS; ROBERT HALE LIMITED; SMALL PRESSES AND LIMITED EDITIONS. LONG, LYDA BELKNAP [r] Hyperlink to: Frank Belknap LONG. LONG, WESLEY [s] George O. SMITH. LONGBEARD, FREDERICK [s] Barry B. LONGYEAR. LONGEVITY IMMORTALITY. LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS) A curious phenomenon in GENRE SF is the extreme longevity of some of its writers and many of its publications. In referring to the longevity of writers, we mean their professional lives rather than the span between their births and deaths. Although sf careers spanning more than 50 years are not usual, neither are they especially uncommon. The present records may be those held by Jack WILLIAMSON (1908- ), whose first published story was "The Metal Man" (1928) in AMZ and who was still writing at the time of Beachhead (1992), a span of 64 years; and by Frank Belknap LONG (1903- ), whose first published story was "The Desert Lich" (1924) in Weird Tales, and who was active at least until 1986, making a span of 62 years. Others to break the 50-year mark have included Lloyd Arthur ESHBACH (1910- ), who has published comparatively little fiction but has played an important role in sf publishing, and whose writing career nevertheless runs 60 years from "The Man with the Silver Disc" (1930) to The Scroll of Lucifer (1990); Andre NORTON (1912- ), whose first novel, not sf, was The Prince Commands (1934) - her first sf being "The People of the Crater" (1947) as by Andrew North - and whose most recent book is Songsmith (1992) with A.C. CRISPIN, a span of 58 years; Raymond Z. GALLUN (1910- ), who began with "The Space Dwellers" (1929) and whose most recent novel was Bioblast (1985), a span of 56 years (increased to 62 years if we take into account his sf memoir Starclimber [1991]); Clifford D. SIMAK (1904-1988), whose first published sf was "The World of the Red Sun" (1931) and whose last was Highway of Eternity (1986), a span of 55 years; L. Sprague DE CAMP (1907- ), who began with "The Isolinguals" (1937) and who recently published The Swords of Zinjaban (1991) with his wife Catherine A. Crook de Camp, a span of 54 years; Frederik POHL (1919- ), who published a slew of short stories under pseudonyms in 1940-41 and whose most recent book is Mining the Oort (1992), a span of 52 years; Fritz LEIBER (1910-1992), who began with "Two Sought Adventure" (1939) in Unknown and whose late collection The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (coll 1990) ed Martin H. GREENBERG announces his writing lifespan on the cover; and Murray LEINSTER (1896-1975), whose first published sf was "The Runaway Skyscraper" (1919) and whose last was Land of the Giants No 3: Unknown Danger (1969), a span of 50 years. Among non-genre writers who nevertheless published several books of sf, the prolific Eden PHILLPOTTS (1862-1960) had altogether a 70-year career (1889-1959), and his fantasy writing career ran 54 years from A Deal With the Devil (1895) to Address Unknown (1949). Even a comparative youngster, in terms of natural lifespan, like Isaac ASIMOV (1920-1992), whose career began when he was very young with "Marooned Off Vesta" (1939), managed a 50-year span up to the solo novel Nemesis (1989), and indeed continued to write stories, collaborative novels and articles until only months before his death early in 1992. Robert A. HEINLEIN (1907-1988), even though he began writing quite late, managed 48 years between "Lifeline" (1939) and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987).The lengths of these professional lives and of others like them are not merely trivial material for the record books. They came about partly because the sf community, made up of writers, editors, publishers, agents, critics and fans, exists as a community - a community which, sometimes sentimentally, and in the face of a clear decline in their writing power, cares for its elders (although surprisingly many have continued to write well, Fritz Leiber being a particularly clear example). It is ironic that the literature of the future is, to a degree, in the hands of men and women of the past; and there is no doubt that many young writers, trying to get published, have cursed the names of Asimov or Heinlein, who not only took up valuable space in the bookstores but also, it must have seemed, would never stop writing.The longevity of these careers is matched by the longevity of the texts. There is no other genre which keeps its classic texts in print or focuses on its past with anything like the same selfconscious zeal as sf does. In sf, work dating as far back as the mid-1930s, like the Lensman books of E.E. "Doc" SMITH, was still finding new readers in the 1980s. The writers of the GOLDEN AGE OF SF - Asimov, Heinlein, Simak, James BLISH, A.E. VAN VOGT, Ray BRADBURY, Arthur C. CLARKE and many others - are recycled for each generation (though some, like Simak and van Vogt, seem at last to be fading from sight). The same is true of more recent classics (some of them almost 40 years old now) by Jack VANCE, Frank HERBERT, Philip K. DICK and a host of others.The oddity of this is that contemporary visions of the future exist side-by-side with rivals that, in the context of our century of rapid change, are ancient history. What confuses the issue further is the tendency of sf, like the Worm Ouroboros, to eat its own tail (or its own parents). There is a strangely conservative self-cannibalism in the sf culture, always redigesting "new" ideas which might easily be 60 years old, and this practice is not restricted to its lower echelons. Of all genres, one might expect sf-with its focus on change and the future - to be the one whose cutting edge would be continually resharpened. But, faced with the actual situation, we might cynically propose that sf is more like a wave, whose constituent molecules - the writers working at any one time - are always changing, but which seems as it approaches us to be exactly the same wave it was while still distant.There are good aspects, however, to the longevity of successful sf texts. Sf's generic stability is a function of its past co-existing with its present, and it is for this reason, too, that sf's icons take on such density and richness, so that it has become the most resonant of all popular literatures. Its words and its metaphors and its narrative structures carry not just the burden of yesterday but also that of some of yesterday's excitement (and these images are not static; they slowly grow and change with the years, like a tree).An sf that was always genuinely new would be intolerable; it would concuss us with future shock. The reward for sf's longevity is that it remains workable; the cost, too often, is that it is also kept familiar and safe. [PN] LONGWAY, A. HUGH Andrew LANG. LONGYEAR, BARRY B(ROOKES) (1942- ) US writer and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977. He soon published his first sf story, "The Tryouts" for IASFM in 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs - an experience which forms the basis of the non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) - he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick Longbeard. Most of the short fiction for which he remains best known was soon released, most notably the stories assembled in Manifest Destiny (coll 1980), which explore their shared universe - dominated by a ruthlessly expanding Earth - with considerable intensity. Enemy Mine (1979 IASFM; 1989 chap dos), which appeared in that volume, won both HUGO and NEBULA and was filmed as ENEMY MINE (1985); with the collaboration of David GERROLD, BBL novelized the film version as Enemy Mine * (1985). In both versions, a human and an ALIEN, caught in the bitter conflict occasioned by human expansion, are isolated together on a primitive planet and must cooperate or die. The Tomorrow Testament (1983) is a loose sequel to the tale, reiterating in competently extended form its lessons.At the same time, BBL began to publish his Circus sequence - comprising, in order of internal chronology, City of Baraboo (coll of linked stories 1980), Elephant Song (1982) and Circus World (coll of linked stories 1981) - about the escape of a circus troop from Earth, its misadventures, its colonizing of the planet Momus, and the final triumph of its representatives as an interstellar act. Most of the contents of It Came from Schenectady (coll 1984) had first appeared by 1981. In 1980 BBL won the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer.After the gap caused by his hospital experience, BBL returned to active work with a sharp DYSTOPIA about OVERPOPULATION, Sea of Glass (1987), told from the viewpoint of a child whose birth was illegal but promulgated by the COMPUTER which struggles coldly to deal with the huge excess of humans on the planet. Later novels like Naked Came the Robot (1988), The God Box (1989), Infinity Hold (1989) and The Homecoming (1989) are variously of interest, but exhibit some intermittent sense of fatigue. At the same time, the alert clarity and genre cunning of BBL's best work seem potentially available to him, and may surface at any point in the 1990s. [JC]Other works: Science Fiction Writer's Workshop - I: An Introduction to Fiction Mechanics (1980); two Alien Nation tv ties: The Change *(1994), which novelizes an unproduced script, and Slag Like Me*(1994), which novelizes material from a cancelled season.See also: ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE. LONNERSTRAND, STURE [r] SCANDINAVIA. LOOKER Film (1981). Ladd Co./Warner Bros. Dir Michael CRICHTON, starring Albert Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey, Leigh Taylor-Young. Screenplay Crichton. 94 mins cut to 90 mins. Colour.L was intended by Crichton as a comedy, but the studio wanted a suspense thriller, and the result falls confusingly between the two. Three models, after having undergone surgery to make them even more beautiful, are murdered, and the plastic surgeon (Finney) wonders why. Villainous company Digital Matrix, whose employees have guns which create time-lapses in the victims, plans to use computer-generated human images (the murder of their human originals is never explained) in a tv advertising campaign designed to exploit the LOOKER (Light Ocular-Oriented Kinetic Emotive Responses) system for mind-control by hypnosis. L seems to be badly cut, since it is full of loose ends and non sequiturs. The sequences of computer imaging are striking, the SATIRE against the advertising business heavy-handed. [PN] LOOMIS, NOEL (MILLER) (1905-1969) US writer and editor, active in the magazine field for some time, publishing work under his own name and as Benjamin Miller, and a book as by Silas Water. Though his first novel, Murder Goes to Press (1937), was a thriller, he was most successful as an author of Westerns. In his first sf novel, City of Glass (1942 Startling Stories; exp 1955), based on his first sf story, three men are time-warped into a desolate distant future on Earth; "Iron Men" (1945) is a sequel. A second novel, The Man with Absolute Motion (1955) as by Silas Water, is likewise set in a desolate venue; in this case the Universe is running out of energy. After saving the Universe, the eponymous hero takes an Eve figure back to a depopulated Earth, and plans to breed. [JC] LOOSLEY, WILLIAM ROBERT [r] David LANGFORD. LORAN, MARTIN John BAXTER. LORD, GABRIELLE (1946- ) Australian author, mostly of thrillers, who has been publishing novels since 1980. Her fourth, Salt (1990), is a routine post- HOLOCAUST novel set in Australia in AD2075, the holocaust having been the product of OVERPOPULATION, POLLUTION and dreadful damage to the ECOLOGY. [PN] LORD, JEFFREY Lyle Kenyon ENGEL; Roland GREEN; Ray NELSON; Manning Lee STOKES. LORD OF THE FLIES 1. Film (1963). Allen-Hodgdon Productions/Two Arts. Dir Peter Brook, starring James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards, Roger Elwin. Screenplay Brook, based on The Lord of the Flies (1954) by William GOLDING. 91 mins. B/w.Set in the NEAR FUTURE, the film concerns a group of English schoolboys whose plane crash-lands on a remote island. With two exceptions the boys quickly revert to savagery, resulting in the murder of one of them. LOTF can be interpreted in several ways: as a demonstration of the validity of the belief in Original Sin; as a variation on H.G. WELLS's theme that civilization is only skin-deep (also demonstrated by the implication that WWIII is taking place elsewhere); or as an indictment of the English public-school system. It is an honest but "literary" (and not very cinematic) rendition of a story that works better as a novel.2. Film (1990). Castle Rock Entertainment/Nelson Entertainment/A Jack's Camp/Signal Hill production. Dir Harry Hook, starring Balthazar Getty, Chris Furrh, Daniel Pipoly. Screenplay Sarah Schiff, based on the Golding novel. 90 mins. Colour.This updated remake (the boys are US rather than UK) is well made, and its less than reverent adherence to its distinguished source does not hurt it. The main adaptation is to modify the hanged pilot of the original into a badly injured pilot who arrives on the island with the boys, crawls into a cave and comes to be regarded as a MONSTER. [JB/PN] LORDS OF THE DEEP Roger CORMAN. LORINCZ, LASZLO L. [r] HUNGARY. LORRAH, JEAN (c1942- ) US writer and academic, professor of English at Murray State University in Kentucky. For the sf reader her writing career has perhaps seemed to lack focus, being broken into three areas of concentration. After fan involvement in the Star Trek OPEN UNIVERSE, she began publishing sf with the first of her collaborations with Jacqueline LICHTENBERG, First Channel (1980), a volume in the latter's Sime/Gen sequence; though this and Channel's Destiny (1982) and Zelerod's Doom (1986) are worthy companions to Lichtenberg's solo efforts, JL was perceived as the junior partner in the enterprise, a perception modified by the publication of her solo venture in the sequence, Ambrov Keon (1986). Her second area of concentration was the Savage Empire series of fantasies concerning MAGIC: Savage Empire (1981), Dragon Lord of the Savage Empire (1982), Captives of the Savage Empire (1984), Flight to the Savage Empire (1986) with Winston A. Howlett, Sorcerers of the Frozen Isles (1986), Wulfston's Odyssey: A Tale of the Savage Empire (1987) with Howlett, and Empress Unborn (1988). It is with her third focus, novels written for STAR TREK and STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, that she has become perhaps most identified: Full Moon Rising * (1976 chap), The Night of the Twin Moons * (1976), Epilogue, Part 1 * (1979 chap) and Epilogue, Part 2 * (1979 chap), Jean Lorrah's Sarek Collection * (coll 1980), The Vulcan Academy Murders * (1984) and The IDIC Epidemic * (1988) are contributions to Star Trek proper, and Survivors * (1989) and Metamorphosis * (1990) contributions to Star Trek: The Next Generation. [JC] LORRAINE, ALDEN [s] Forrest J. ACKERMAN. LORRAINE, LILITH One of at least 5 pseudonyms of Mary Maude Wright (nee Dunn) (1894-1967), US writer, poet, editor and radio lecturer, who regularly published sf in the 1930s PULP MAGAZINES. The Brain of the Planet (1929 chap), from Hugo GERNSBACK's Science Fiction series, is a FEMINIST socialist UTOPIA, as is her "Into the 28th Century" (1930 Science Wonder Quarterly). Her favourite themes included classless societies, revised gender roles and ESP. Between 1937 and 1967 she also edited poetry magazines and wrote much verse, including Banners of Victory (coll 1937 chap), Beyond Bewilderment (coll 1942 chap), They (1943 chap), The Day before Judgement (coll 1944 chap) and Trailing Clouds of Glory (coll 1947 chap), Call on the Rocks 1944-47 (coll 1947 chap); Let the Patterns Break (omni 1947) assembles the previous volumes. The later Wine of Wonder (coll 1951 chap) was advertised as being the first volume of POETRY devoted to sf. It is hard to say that LL had an individual voice, though she did at times effectively translate common poetic idioms into sf terms. In 1940 she founded Avalon, a poetry association. [JD/JC]About the author: "Empress of the Stars" by Steve Sneyd in Fantasy Commentator #43, 1992. LORRAINE, PAUL House name for CURTIS WARREN used by William Henry BIRD for Two Worlds (1952), John Russell FEARN for Dark Boundaries (1953) and John S. GLASBY for Zenith-D (1952). [PN/JC] LORY, ROBERT (EDWARD) (1936- ) US public relations adviser and writer who began publishing sf with "Rundown" for Worlds of If in 1963; his stories have been assembled as A Harvest of Hoodwinks (coll 1970 dos). His sf novels, mostly light, fantasy-laced adventures, are unambitious but competent; they include Identity Seven (1974) and The Thirteen Bracelets (1974). The Trovo series - The Eyes of Bolsk (1969 dos) and Master of the Etrax (1970) - and the Shamryke Odell sequence - Masters of the Lamp (1970 dos) and The Veiled World (1972 dos) - are SCIENCE FANTASY of an undemanding sort. [JC]Other works: 2 horror/fantasy series: the Dracula sequence, comprising Dracula Returns! (1973), The Hand of Dracula (1973), Dracula's Brother (1973), Dracula's Gold (1973), Drums of Dracula (1974), The Witching of Dracula (1974), Dracula's Lost World (1974), Dracula's Disciple (1975) and Challenge to Dracula (1975), featuring an immortal Dracula who has survived ATLANTIS; the Horrorscope sequence, comprising The Green Flames of Aries (1974), The Revenge of Taurus (1974), The Curse of Leo (1974) and Gemini Smile, Gemini Kill (1975). LOST ATLANTIS Die HERRIN VON ATLANTIS . LOST CONTINENT, THE Film (1968). Hammer/20th Century-Fox. Dir Michael Carreras, starring Eric Porter, Hildegard Knef, Suzanna Leigh, Darryl Read. Screenplay Michael Nash, based on Uncharted Seas (1938) by Dennis WHEATLEY. 98 mins. Colour.A ramshackle freighter wanders into the Sargasso Sea and becomes trapped in a "lost continent" of seaweed. Passengers and crew then face the onslaught of various menaces, including a giant octopus, a giant crab, carnivorous seaweed and, finally, a lost race ( LOST WORLDS) whose people, descended from Spanish conquistadores, travel in BALLOONS. Bad but enjoyable, wholly absurd; good art direction. [JB/PN] LOST HORIZON 1. Film (1937). Columbia. Dir Frank Capra, starring Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, Sam Jaffe, Edward Everett Horton, H.B. Warner. Screenplay Robert Riskin, based on Lost Horizon (1933) by James HILTON. 133 mins, cut to 118 mins, then to 109 mins; but full print now available. B/w.In this memorably sentimental, deft, trite, enormously popular UTOPIAN/ LOST-WORLD film set in the Himalayas, survivors of a plane crash find themselves in the mysterious, tranquil city of Shangri-La. It is ruled by the High Lama, a kindly old buffer, who tells them that war and disease do not exist here and that if they remain in the city they will live for ever. After some time the hero (Colman) leaves with his brother and a Shangri-La woman, who ages with appalling speed away from her home. After a brief return to civilization, Colman realizes that he has abandoned true happiness, and is last seen, hauntingly, struggling through the snow and in long shot, reaching the gate of the forbidden city as the bells ring out and the audience weeps.2. Film (1973). Columbia. Prod Ross Hunter. Dir Charles Jarrott, starring Peter Finch, Liv Ullman, Sally Kellerman, George Kennedy, Charles Boyer, Michael York. Screenplay Larry Kramer. 150 mins, cut to 143 mins. Colour.Long, lush, sluggish remake with banal songs (by Hal David and Burt Bacharach) and much stilted dialogue in Hollywood's philosophical vein. The original piece of hokum was orchestrated by Capra with skill and conviction; this unmagical version was a box-office failure. [JB/PN] LOST IN SPACE US tv series (1965-68). An Irwin Allen Production in association with Van Bernard Productions for 20th Century-Fox Television/CBS. Created Irwin ALLEN, also executive prod. Story consultant Anthony Wilson. Writers included Peter Packer, William Welch, Bob and Wanda Duncan, Carey Wilbur, Barney Slater. Dirs included Harry Harris, Sutton Roley, Nathan Juran, Don Richardson, Sobey Martin. 3 seasons, 83 50min episodes. 1st season b/w; colour from 2nd.LIS was aimed primarily at children. The Robinsons' spacecraft is sabotaged by an enemy agent, causing them to crash-land on a remote planet. The group consists of the family of 5 - the series was originally to be called Space Family Robinson - along with a young male co-pilot (Mark Goddard) and the whining saboteur, Dr Smith, played with comic but sinister effect by Jonathan Harris; the Robinsons were played by June Lockhart, Guy Williams, Angela Cartwright, Marta Kristen and Billy Mumy. There was also a ROBOT, whose catch-phrase was "That does not compute". Though remote, the planet soon became a stopping-off point for practically every space-travelling alien or monster in the Galaxy, each episode seeing the arrival of some new visitor. After the first season the Robinsons got back into space themselves. As the series progressed the young boy (Mumy) and the ambiguous Dr Smith became the central characters, together with the robot, while the others receded more and more into the background. The stories, at first straight sf, became more and more fantastic. LIS was probably the most enjoyable of Irwin Allen's many excursions into televised sf. Lost in Space * (1967) by Dave VAN ARNAM and Ron Archer (Ted WHITE) is a novelization. [JB/PN] LOST PLANET, THE 1. Film serial (1953). Columbia. Dir Spencer G. Bennet, starring Judd Holdren, Vivian Mason, Ted Thorpe, Forrest Taylor, Michael Fox. Script George H. Plympton, Arthur Hoerl. This 15-part children's series - Hollywood's last sf serial - featured an investigative reporter, a mad SCIENTIST, a ROBOT and an attempted alien INVASION of Earth. Individual "chapters" had titles like "Blasted by the Thermic Disintegrator" and "Snared by the Prysmic Catapult".2. UK tv serial (1954). BBC TV. Prod Kevin Sheldon, starring Peter Kerr, Jack Stewart, Mary Law. Script by Angus MacVicar, based on his The Lost Planet (1953). 6 25min episodes. B/w. This was one of the first sf-related BBC TV serials for children; previously it had been a very popular RADIO serial. An atomic-powered spacecraft takes a group, including one child, to the lost planet of Hesikos. A sequel, Return to the Lost Planet, based on MacVicar's Return to the Lost Planet (1954), was produced the following year. We can find no evidence for the assertion in The Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction (1990) by Roger Fulton that MacVicar is a pseudonym of Andre NORTON. [PN/JB] LOST RACES ANTHROPOLOGY; LOST WORLDS. LOST WORLD, THE 1. Film (1925). First National. Dir Harry O. Hoyt, starring Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Bessie Love, Lloyd Hughes. Script Marion Fairfax, based on The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan DOYLE. 9700ft (approx 105 mins, cut to 60 mins). B/w, with some tinted sequences.Wallace Beery makes an unlikely Professor Challenger in this slow-moving, wordy (a large number of dialogue frames) silent version of the famous novel about the discovery of an almost inaccessible South American plateau, a LOST WORLD in which prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs and apemen, still live. The film is relatively faithful to the book, certainly more so than the 1960 remake (see below), though one departure occurs at the climax when the brontosaurus taken back to London by Challenger to confound the snooty doubters of the Royal Society breaks free and goes on a rampage that ends with the destruction of Tower Bridge (in the book it was a small pterodactyl that escaped), a forerunner of many sequences in later MONSTER MOVIES. The film is interesting chiefly because of its special effects, the work of stop-motion photography pioneer Willis H. O'BRIEN. It was the first feature film to make large-scale use of model animation combined with live action.2. Film (1960). 20th Century-Fox. Dir Irwin ALLEN, starring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, Jill St John, David Hedison, Fernando Lamas. Screenplay Allen, Charles Bennett. 97 mins. Colour.This rather lifeless remake contains all the usual Irwin Allen banalities, with the customary reliance on spectacle to carry the film. The special effects, supervised by L.B. Abbott, are certainly spectacular; this time the various dinosaurs were portrayed using live lizards photographically enlarged, and their death throes, when the plateau is engulfed by volcanic fire, are alarmingly realistic. [JB] LOST WORLDS This rubric covers lost races, lost cities, lost lands: all the enclaves of mystery in a rapidly shrinking world that featured so largely in the sf of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This subgenre was obviously a successor to the FANTASTIC VOYAGES of the 18th century and earlier, but there are important distinctions to be drawn. The earlier tales had belonged to a world which was still geographically "open"; at the time Jonathan SWIFT wrote Gulliver's Travels (1726), Australia had yet to be discovered by Europeans and Africa had yet to be explored. The lost-world story, however, belonged to a cartographically "closed" world: in Jules VERNE's and H. Rider HAGGARD's day unknown territories were fast disappearing. The options were running out, and hence the 19th-century lost lands tended to be situated in the most inaccessible regions of the globe: the Amazon basin, Himalayan valleys, central-Asian and Australian deserts, at the poles, or within the HOLLOW EARTH. These works are also distinguishable from earlier travellers' tales by their much greater "scientific" content. The new sciences of geology, ANTHROPOLOGY and, above all, archaeology had a considerable influence on Verne, Haggard and their successors. For a while, the fiction was concurrent with the reality (at least in the popular mind). From the discoveries of Troy and Nineveh to those of Machu Picchu and Tutankhamun's tomb, there flourished a "heroic age" of archaeology and scientific exploration, of which the fiction was a natural concomitant.The fiction was often based on PSEUDO-SCIENCE rather than real science, for example the many ATLANTIS stories which followed the success of Ignatius DONNELLY's nonfiction Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882). Tales of undiscovered worlds within the Earth tended to be based on the crackpot geology of John Cleves SYMMES. Perhaps the best of all inner-world fantasies (though not set in a full-scale Symmesian Hollow Earth) is Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans anon as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK) by Jules Verne, in which explorers reach a subterranean sea by way of an extinct volcano. Other underground lost worlds include LYTTON's The Coming Race (1871; vt Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 1972 US), William N. HARBEN's The Land of the Changing Sun (1894), John M. LEAHY's Drome (1927 Weird Tales; 1952), Stanton A. COBLENTZ's Hidden World (1935 Wonder Stories as "In Caverns Below"; 1957) and Joseph O'NEILL's Land Under England (1935). The Hollow-Earth story "Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole" (1977) by Steven UTLEY and Howard WALDROP is a pastiche of this whole tradition.The archetypes of the lost-race story are, in the main, unrepentantly romantic. Edgar Rice BURROUGHS was an extensive contributor to the subgenre (with, for example, The Land that Time Forgot [1918 Blue Book; 1924] and most of his Tarzan novels) but its most famous exponent was a generation earlier: H. Rider Haggard, whose lost-race fantasies include King Solomon's Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887), She (1887) - these two introducing the hugely popular erotic motif of the beautiful queen, or high priestess, who attempts to seduce the hero - The People of the Mist (1894), The Yellow God (1908) and Queen Sheba's Ring (1910); the publication dates of these novels span the period when the species was in its heyday. Other notable examples are William WESTALL's The Phantom City (1886), James DE MILLE's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) and Thomas JANVIER's The Aztec Treasure House (1890). The best-known individual work in the genre may be The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan DOYLE, a perennially popular adventure story about the discovery of surviving prehistoric creatures on a South American plateau ( The LOST WORLD ). The species was popular in the general-fiction pulps but was in decline by the time the first SF MAGAZINES appeared, though lost-world stories by A. MERRITT - The Face in the Abyss (1923-30 Argosy; fixup 1931) - and by A. Hyatt VERRILL - The Bridge of Light (1929; 1950) - proved influential on some later sf writers. John TAINE's The Purple Sapphire (1924) and The Greatest Adventure (1929) have stronger sf elements than usual, though somewhat vaguely described superscientific technology was common enough in the subgenre. Other authors of lost-race stories include Grant ALLEN, Austyn GRANVILLE, Andrew LANG, William LE QUEUX, John MASTIN, S.P. MEEK, Talbot MUNDY, Hume NISBET, Gordon STABLES, Rex STOUT, E. Charles VIVIAN and S. Fowler WRIGHT.Even from the 1930s, when fewer lost-world stories were being published, there were occasional popular successes. The film KING KONG (1933) opens in a lost world. James HILTON's mystical Tibetan romance of IMMORTALITY, Lost Horizon (1933), was a bestseller ( LOST HORIZON). Later examples can be found in the work of Dennis WHEATLEY, including The Fabulous Valley (1934), Uncharted Seas (1938), which was filmed as The LOST CONTINENT , and The Man who Missed the War (1945).Only very occasional lost-race novels have appeared since WWII. Ian CAMERON's The Lost Ones (1961; vt Island at the Top of the World) is set in the Arctic and was filmed by Disney as The Island at the Top of the World (1974) dir Robert Stevenson. Stones of Enchantment (1948) by Wyndham MARTYN, The City of Frozen Fire (1950) by Vaughan WILKINS, Lost Island (1954) by Graham MCINNES and The Rose of Tibet (1962) by Lionel DAVIDSON seem rather old-fashioned. Gilbert PHELPS's The Winter People (1963), though, is an intelligent novel about an eccentric South American explorer and his discovery of a remarkable tribe. Stephen TALL's The People beyond the Walls (1980) is a remarkably late example. Generally, though, postwar lost-race stories edge close to pastiche; several examples are given in the HOLLOW EARTH entry.The fact that this species of fantasy was so little influenced by scientific thought may be a result of its being largely anachronistic (and therefore implausible) from its beginnings. Once TRANSPORTATION technology had allowed Phileas Fogg to achieve his object, the lost-race fantasy owed more to the desire that enclaves of mystery should exist than to the likelihood that they did. Even from the point of view of sociological or political thought-experiments, the genre had surprisingly little to offer. The lost-race story is obviously an opportunity for the setting up of imaginary UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS, but these elements are not as common as might be expected, and most of the stories listed above - which include the best-remembered classics of the genre - are quite straightforward romantic adventure. It has been suggested, too, that such stories allow exercises in imaginary cultural ANTHROPOLOGY, but few of these stories are of any real interest in this respect - an exception being the late example Providence Island: An Archaeological Tale (1959) by Jacquetta HAWKES - and they have more to offer the student of popular mythology - in which context they are discussed by Brian Street in The Savage in Literature (1975). Oddly enough there is more and better cultural anthropology in offworld stories of planetary exploration and COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS (mostly postwar), subgenres that largely superseded the lost-race story, than there are in lost-race stories set on Earth.Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) by Everett F. BLEILER lists and describes some hundreds of lost-race stories up to 1930, its index allowing a sort by scientific advancement (from barbaric to superscientific), or by location (Antarctic to Siberia), or by racial derivation (from Atlantean via Hebrew and Old Norse to Phoenician). A relevant essay is "Lost Lands, Lost Races: A Pagan Princess of Their Very Own" by Thomas D. CLARESON in Many Futures, Many Worlds (anth 1977) ed Clareson. [DP/BS/PN]See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); ISLANDS; PASTORAL. LOTT, S. MAKEPEACE Working name of UK author Stanley Makepeace-Lott (? - ), whose Escape to Venus (1956) is an ORWELL-influenced DYSTOPIAN view of a VENUS colony established 60 years after a 1980 world war. [JE] LOTTMAN, EILEEN (1927- ) US writer of ties, mainly for the The BIONIC WOMAN tv series: The Bionic Woman #1: Welcome Home Jaime * (1976; vt Double Identity 1976 UK as by Maud Willis) and #2: Extracurricular Activities * (1977; vt A Question of Life 1977 UK as by Maud Willis). Singleton ties include The Devil's Rain * (1975) as by Willis and Through the Looking Glass * (1976) as by Molly Flute. [JC] LOUDON, JANE (WEBB) (1807-1858) UK author of many books on popular natural history and gardening, and of The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827; much rev 1828), published anon. Around a somewhat melodramatic plot - the Mummy of Cheops conspires with a Roman Catholic priest in AD2126 to control the choice of the next Queen of England - JL assembles a number of elaborate speculations about inventions of the future, including mechanical farming, movable housing and weather control, among the more plausible. [JC]See also: HISTORY OF SF; NEAR FUTURE; UTOPIAS. LOVE AND ROCKETS US COMIC book created in 1981 by the brothers Gilbert (1957- ), Jaime and Mario Hernandez. #1, self-published, featured a 40pp future-apocalyptic chase-thriller, "BEM", by Gilbert; it introduced tail-chasing supersleuth Castle Radium as well as Luba, a continuing star of much of Gilbert's output. Also in #1 were some short pieces by Jaime; one of these, "Mechan-X", introduced the characters Maggie, Hopey and Rand Race, who featured in #2's 40pp story "Mechanics", which told of a group of prosolar mechanics (essentially, super-repairmen) who are trying to fix a crashed rocket-ship in a primordial jungle. Except for later references to Maggie's prosolar job and a brief strip about a little Black girl in outer space ("Rocky"), the sf elements have since disappeared from LAR - a fact often regarded by the magazine's enthusiasts as being all to the good. Fantagraphics has published LAR since reprinting #1 in 1982, and also brought out Jaime's "Mechanics" as a 3-issue colour comic in 1985. [SW] LOVECRAFT, H(OWARD) P(HILLIPS) (1890-1937) US writer who spent almost all his life in Providence, RI, maintaining social contacts mainly by mail. He joined the United Amateur Press Association ( APA) in 1914 and produced much of his early fiction in connection with this enterprise, which also allowed him to come in touch with Clark Ashton SMITH, Frank Belknap LONG and others. He began to publish professionally with the serial release of Herbert West Reanimator (1922 Home Brew; 1977 chap), but only began to establish himself when he started, with "Dagon" (1923), publishing in WEIRD TALES; his prolific correspondence with many other of its writers made him a key influence on that magazine: without his background presence its highly significant contribution to the development of US weird fiction would have been considerably weakened. His disciples included Robert BLOCH, August W. DERLETH, Henry KUTTNER and E. Hoffman PRICE. Derleth, with assistance from Donald WANDREI, founded ARKHAM HOUSE to reprint HPL's work, and the imprint was later to provide a haven for other writers influenced by HPL, including Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley. Colin WILSON is another modern writer who has written Lovecraftian novels, notably The Philosopher's Stone (1969).Although HPL's primary reputation is as a HORROR writer, his later works - those of his stories belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos - attempted to develop a distinctive species of "cosmic horror", employing premises drawn from sf: other DIMENSIONS, INVASION by ALIENS, and interference with human cultural and physiological EVOLUTION. He tried to convey a sense that the Universe is essentially horrible and hostile to humankind by means of a distinctive prose style which extends by gradual degrees from a quasiclinical mode into passages of dense, highly adjectival description. A notable essay by HPL on the historical roots of his fiction is Supernatural Horror in Literature(first magazine publication 1927; revised magazine publication 1933-35; 1939; 1945). HPL encouraged other writers to use the background of the Cthulhu Mythos; The Reader's Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos (1969; rev 1973) by Robert E. WEINBERG and Edward P. Berglund lists many such writers including (in addition to those already cited) Lin CARTER, Robert E. HOWARD, Fritz LEIBER, Robert A.W. LOWNDES and Manly Wade WELLMAN. HPL's principal Cthulhu Mythos stories - which include his best works - are "The Nameless City" (1921), "The Festival" (1925), The Colour out of Space (1927; 1982 chap), "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928), "The Dunwich Horror" (1929), "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931), "The Dreams in the Witch-House" (1933), "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936), The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936), "The Shadow out of Time" (cut 1936; 1939), At the Mountains of Madness (cut 1936; 1939; 1990 chap), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (cut 1941; 1943; dated 1951 but 1952 UK) and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937).The first Arkham House HPL collection was The Outsider and Others (coll 1939), which contained all his major works except The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which first appeared in book form in the subsequent Arkham volume Beyond the Wall of Sleep (coll 1943). Marginalia (coll 1944) included some stories HPL had revised for other writers as well as essays, fragments and appreciations; a complete collection of such revisions is The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (coll 1970; cut vt Nine Stories from The Horror in the Museum 1971; vt in 2 vols as The Horror in the Museum 1975 UK and The Horror in the Burying Ground1975 UK; rev and corrected 1989). HPL's complete works can be obtained in 3 vols: The Dunwich Horror and Others (coll 1963; cut vt The Colour out of Space, and Others 1964; full text vt The Best of H.P. Lovecraft 1982; corrected text under original title 1985), a title not to be confused with The Dunwich Horror, and Other Weird Tales (coll 1945); At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (coll 1964; cut 1968 UK; again cut 1971 US; corrected text under original title 1985); and Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (coll 1965; much cut vt Dagon 1967 UK; UK edn again cut, vt The Tomb 1969 UK; corrected text of original version 1986). The bibliography of the many other collections drawn from the corpus is inordinately complicated, and is supplemented by many chapbooks recovering all manner of trivia; the most frequently reprinted eclectic selections are The Haunter of the Dark (coll 1951 UK), which was a cut version of Best Supernatural Stories of H.P. Lovecraft (coll 1945), both ed Derleth, The Doom that Came to Sarnath (coll 1971) ed Lin Carter and Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of H.P. Lovecraft (coll 1982). Several SMALL PRESSES have been and are dedicated to the celebration of his works, most notably the Necronomicon Press, which publishes the journal Lovecraft Studies ed S.T. Joshi, and, since 1990, when it took the title over from Cryptic Publications, the long-running Crypt of Cthulhu ed Robert M. Price. Several bibliographies of primary and secondary sources have been published, including Joshi's H. P. Lovecraft: An Annotated Bibliography (1981). These small presses have given a home to early work by several modern writers of note, including Thomas Ligotti (1953- ).Derleth wrote many stories based on fragmentary texts by HPL or on notes for unwritten stories, including the novel The Lurker at the Threshold (1945), the stories in The Survivor and Others (coll 1957) and 2 stories in The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (coll 1959; cut 1970 UK), which also contains some HPL juvenilia and essays about him; it is not to be confused with The Shuttered Room (coll 1971). All the Derleth "collaborations" are assembled in The Watchers Out of Time and Others (coll 1974); all but The Lurker at the Threshold had been in The Shadow out of Time and Other Tales of Horror (coll 1968 UK), along with the 6 which The Haunter of the Dark omitted from its parent collection. The Derleth stories are weak exercises in pastiche, and Derleth's editing of HPL's own stories came in for some criticism in the 1980s on the grounds of alleged insensitivity and distortion, necessitating the corrected editions of the 3 Arkham House collections. [BS]Other works: This list is selective, not including all small-press publications, nor items of Lovecraftiana containing little or no actual fiction by him: Fungi from Yuggoth (coll 1941), poetry, not to be confused with vt of 1963 collection (see below); The Lurking Fear (coll 1947; vt Cry Horror! 1958), not to be confused with either The Lurking Fear (coll 1964 UK) or The Lurking Fear (coll 1971), all 3 with differing contents, or with The Lurking Fear (1928 Weird Tales; 1977 chap), which reprints the story alone; The Curse of Yig (coll 1953); Dreams and Fantasies (coll 1962); The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943; 1955), not to be confused with The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (coll 1970) ed Lin Carter; Something about Cats, and Other Pieces (coll 1949), revisions, essays, notes, etc.; Collected Poems (coll 1963; cut vt Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems 1971); Selected Letters 1911-1937 (5 vols 1965-76); Uncollected Prose and Poetry (coll 1978) ed S.T. Joshi and Marc Michaud.About the author: Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (1972) by Lin CARTER; Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) by L. Sprague DE CAMP; Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Dreamer on the Nightside (1975) by Frank Belknap LONG; The Dream Quest of H.P. Lovecraft (1978) by Darrell SCHWEITZER; The H.P. Lovecraft Companion (1977) by Philip A. Schrefler; The Major Works of H.P. Lovecraft (1977) by John Taylor Gatto; H.P. Lovecraft (1982) by S.T. Joshi; H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (1983) by Donald R. Burleson.See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; DEVOLUTION; FANTASY; FANZINE; GAMES AND TOYS; GOTHIC SF; INVISIBILITY; METAL HURLANT; MONSTERS; OPEN UNIVERSE; PARALLEL WORLDS; PARANOIA; PSEUDO-SCIENCE; PSYCHOLOGY; PUBLISHING; SUSPENDED ANIMATION. LOVEJOY, JACK (1937- ) US writer with an advanced degree in Roman history who began publishing work of genre interest with The Rebel Witch (1978), a fantasy for children. His first sf novels, Star Gods (dated 1978 but 1979) and The Hunters (1982), combine sf-adventure routines with some cultural extrapolation. The Vision of Beasts sequence - Creation Descending (1984), The Second Kingdom (1984) and The Brotherhood of Diablo (1985) - is set in a fairly remote post- HOLOCAUST USA, where California has become an archipelago and the mainland is overrun by MUTANTS known as "gunks". [JC]Other works: Magus Rex (1983), a fantasy; Guardians of the Three #4: Defenders of Ar * (1990), a SHARED-WORLD fantasy tie. LOVELOCK, JAMES (EPHRAIM) [r] Michael ALLABY; BIOLOGY; ECOLOGY; LIVING WORLDS. LOVE ROMANCES PUBLISHING CO. PLANET STORIES; TOPS IN SCIENCE FICTION. LOVE, ROSALEEN (1940- ) Australian author, science journalist and lecturer in the history and philosophy of science. RL has been publishing short fiction - not all sf - since 1985, and has won a number of Australian MAINSTREAM awards for her stories. The astringent sf FABULATIONS collected in The Total Devotion Machine and Other Stories (coll 1989 UK) and Evolution Annie and Other Stories (coll 1993 UK) are wry, intelligent and often funny; RL's style is straight-faced irony. Her subject matter is often FEMINIST - as in the title story of the second volume, which is a kind of counter-version of Roy LEWIS's What We Did to Father (1960) - or ecological. [PN]See also: AUSTRALIA. LOVE WAR, THE Made-for-tv film (1970). Paramount/ABC-TV. Dir George McCowan, starring Lloyd Bridges, Angie Dickinson, Harry Basch, Dan Travanti. Screenplay Guerdon Trueblood, David Kidd. 74 mins. Colour.Six aliens from two warring planets arrive on Earth for a duel to the death to decide which of those planets is the victor. Four are eliminated; one survivor (Bridges) opts to try to stop the fight, remain on Earth, merge with the natives, and have a relationship with a woman (Dickinson). He promises that they will marry as soon as he can overcome the other survivor, whom he knows to be closing in for the kill. The surprise revelation of his fiancee's true identity will not surprise B-movie and sf fans. This is an unpretentious and entertaining sf thriller. [JB] LOVIN, ROGER [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. LOW, A(RCHIBALD) M(ONTGOMERY) (1888-1956) UK academic, inventor and writer, president of the British Interplanetary Society for a period; in 1917 he invented a flying bomb. In his first sf novel, Adrift in the Stratosphere (1934 Scoops as "Space"; 1937), a juvenile, the young protagonists accidentally take off in a professor's rocket-ship. In Mars Breaks Through (1937) a scientist possessed by a Martian can bring about world peace, but seems unwilling to. Satellite in Space (1956) is a SPACE OPERA in which humans, including an old-time Nazi, meet aliens from the asteroid belt. AML also wrote two nonfiction prognoses, The Future (1925) and It's Bound to Happen (1950; vt What's the World Coming To? 1951 US). [JC]Other works: Peter Down the Well (1933), a juvenile.See also: BOYS' PAPERS. LOWNDES, ROBERT A(UGUSTINE) W(ARD) (1916- ) US writer and editor, often referred to as "Doc" Lowndes, a member of the FUTURIANS fan group and collaborator on several stories with other members of the group under the names Arthur COOKE, S.D. GOTTESMAN, Paul Dennis Lavond and Lawrence WOODS. His first story, "The Outpost at Altark" for Super Science in 1940, was written in collaboration with fellow-Futurian Donald A. WOLLHEIM, uncredited. For his solo work in the early 1940s RAWL used the names Carol Grey, Mallory Kent, Wilfred Owen Morley and Richard Morrison; later he added Carl Groener, Robert Morrison, Michael Sherman and Peter Michael Sherman, and once collaborated with James BLISH as John MACDOUGAL.RAWL edited FUTURE FICTION and SCIENCE FICTION QUARTERLY for Columbia Publications from early 1941 until their demise in 1943, and again throughout their shoestring revival in the early 1950s under various titles. He also edited DYNAMIC SCIENCE FICTION (1952-4) and Science Fiction Stories (1954-5) for Columbia Publications, continuing to edit the latter under its new name, The ORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION STORIES , from 1955 until the chain folded in 1960, when he began editing for Health Knowledge Inc. He gradually added a number of fantasy magazines to the latter publisher's line, including The MAGAZINE OF HORROR in 1963, Startling Mystery Stories in 1966, FAMOUS SCIENCE FICTION in 1966, Weird Terror Tales in 1969 and Bizarre Fantasy Tales in 1970, but all became defunct in 1970. He was also the editor of the Avalon Books sf line 1955-67.RAWL wrote a hectic action-adventure novel in collaboration with Blish, The Duplicated Man (1953 Dynamic Science Fiction as by Blish and Michael Sherman; 1959), and later edited the posthumous THE BEST OF JAMES BLISH (coll 1979). He also produced three solo novels: The Mystery of the Third Mine (1953), which is a juvenile, The Puzzle Planet (1961) and Believers' World (1952 Space as "A Matter of Faith" as by Michael Sherman; exp 1959); in the third and most interesting of these, inhabitants of three lost colonies have developed an eccentric RELIGION. His best short stories are H.P. LOVECRAFT-like items such as "The Abyss" (1941) and "The Leapers" (1942 as Carol Grey; rev vt "Leapers" 1968). His literary columns from Famous Science Fiction were assembled as Three Faces of Science Fiction (coll 1973 chap). [BS/PN/JC] LOXMITH, JOHN [s] John BRUNNER. L. RON HUBBARD PRESENTS WRITERS OF THE FUTURE Original anthology series, ed Algis BUDRYS, made up of stories by entrants to the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST and published by Bridge Publications in the USA and New Era in the UK; both publishing houses were originally set up to publish DIANETICS and SCIENTOLOGY textbooks, but had already begun publishing fiction with the novels of L. Ron HUBBARD's unexpected second career in fiction. The contest is quarterly (though an annual award is given also), and most of the anthology stories are first, second or third place-getters. Some fine writers have made their debut in this series (which has survived the controversy surrounding it) - not surprisingly, considering the fairly lavish nature of the awards involved. They include Robert Touzalin (Robert REED), Karen Joy FOWLER, David ZINDELL and Dave WOLVERTON. Anthologies to date, all ed Budrys, are L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (anth 1985), Vol. II (anth 1986), Vol. III (anth 1987), Vol. IV (anth 1988), Vol. V (anth 1989), Vol. VI (anth 1990) and Vol. VII (anth 1991). [PN] LUCAS, E(DWARD) V(ERRALL) (1868-1938) UK editor and writer, the author of innumerable "weekend" essays and tamely belletristic travel books. Of his several novels, The War of the Wenuses (1898), with C(harles) L(arcom) Graves (1856-1944), is of interest as a mildly sexist parody of H.G. WELLS's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898). Wisdom while You Wait: Being a Foretaste of the "Insidecompletuar Britanniaware" (1903), also with Graves, mocks the future Americanization of the world in the form of a parody encyclopedia; further joint titles, in a similar vein, include England Day by Day: A Guide to Efficiency and Prophetic Calendar for 1904 (1903) and If: A Nightmare in the Conditional Mood (1908). Mr Pulteney (1910 chap) as by E. D. Ward - a pseudonym which is simply EVL's first name - is fantasy, featuring a hotel with an ANTIGRAVITY garden for the use of suicides. Wells and Winston Churchill make appearances. [JC] LUCAS, F(RANK) L(AURENCE) (1894-1967) UK writer and critic, better known in the latter capacity. Of his fiction, The Woman Clothed with the Sun and Other Stories (coll of linked stories 1937), like much of the work of F. Britten AUSTIN, presents a didactic rendering of mankind's destiny through a story-sequence, in this case extending from AD53 to 1995, ending in an exemplary cleansing of the human species from the world. [JC] LUCAS, GEORGE (1944- ) US film-maker. He attended the University of Southern California Film School and as a graduate student made an sf short there entitled THX 1138:4EB (1967), which won film festival awards. Working in 1968 as an assistant to Francis Ford Coppola he made a highly praised documentary about the filming of Coppola's The Rain People (1969); then in 1969, with Coppola as executive prod, Lucas began a feature-film version, THX 1138 (1971), of his sf short; it was well received by critics but not a popular success. His second feature, American Graffiti (1973) - about small-town Californian teenagers in the 1950s - established him as a commercial film-maker. Nonetheless, GL had difficulty setting up his next film - a project he had been planning for several years. His hardships were amply recompensed when it was released as STAR WARS (1977) and had the highest box-office takings of any film to that date.Star Wars was singly responsible for the sf film boom (and to a lesser extent the literary boom) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but GL swiftly announced his intention to retire from directing and stick to producing. He has kept that vow, although the films produced under his aegis bear his obvious personal stamp and his directors' personalities are invariably obscured. The EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980), dir Irvin Kershner, and RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983), dir Richard Marquand, conclude the trilogy, persistently rumoured to be only the middle section of a 9-film triptych GL has long had on the back burner. There have been frequent suggestions that the next trilogy, tentatively entitled The Clone Wars, a prequel to the 3 extant films, is due to go into production, but as of 1992 this seems very unlikely. Lucasfilm (GL's company) has made several spinoffs from the Star Wars universe, including the tv movies The EWOK ADVENTURE (1984; theatrically released overseas as Caravan of Courage) and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985). GL sanctioned a new series of Star Wars spin-off books in the 1990s, beginning with Timothy ZAHN's Star Wars: Heir to the Empire * (1991).Although his partnership with his contemporary and rival Steven SPIELBERG has yielded the three commercially successful borderline-fantasy Indiana Jones films, GL has otherwise often had trouble away from the Star Wars universe, failing to make much impact with his productions of the banal fairytales Labyrinth (1986) dir Jim Henson and Willow (1988) dir Ron Howard, and scoring a disastrous miss with Howard the Duck (1986; vt Howard . . . A New Breed of Hero), an adaptation from the comic books. With Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Jackson, GL made Captain EO, a short (viewable only in Disneyland, Disneyworld and the EPCOT Center) employing various sophisticated new techniques and rumoured to have cost over $20 million, despite being only 17 mins long. He has also produced a tv series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (begun 1992).With his pack-rat borrowings from sf, fantasy and Hollywood's past - not to mention his conspicuous espousal of the mythical ideas of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) - GL undoubtedly opened up the cinema for a wave of big-budget sf movies in the 1980s, even while he ensured that its level remained juvenile. The novelization THX 1138 * (1971) was by Ben BOVA, and the novelization Star Wars * (1976), attributed to GL, may have been by Alan Dean FOSTER. Many other books have been spun-off from the Star Wars trilogy. [KN/PN]About the film-maker: Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas (1983) by Dale Pollock.See also: CINEMA; SWORD AND SORCERY. LUCENO, JAMES (? - ) US writer whose main work has been in collaboration with Brian C. DALEY (whom see for details) under the joint pseudonym Jack McKinney, but who has also written solo sf adventures: A Fearful Symmetry (1989), a NEAR-FUTURE thriller about the coming of the Millennium and the arrival of ALIENS; Illegal Alien (1990), an interplanetary SEX spoof and The Big Empty (1993), about a CYBORG caught in a war between biological and mechanical forces. The Shadow* (1994) is a film TIE. [JC] LUCIAN (c120-180) Syrian-Greek writer, known also as Lucian of Samosata; born in Samosata, capital of Commagene, in Syria. He early became an advocate and practised at Antioch, but soon set out on the travels which were to help provide the verisimilitude underlying the fantastic surface of some of his works. He visited Greece, Italy and Gaul, studied philosophy in Athens, and eventually became procurator of part of Egypt, where he died. The number of works attributed to him varies with criteria of authenticity, but at least 80 titles have been suggested, some certainly spurious. His works can be subdivided into various categories, some of little interest to the student of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION: works of formal rhetoric, numerous essays, biographies and the prose fictions - which include The True History and the possibly spurious Lucius, or The Ass - and the series of Dialogues which comprise L's most important work, and to the form of which he gave his name.The Lucianic Dialogue mixes PLATO's Dialogues, Old and New Comedy, and Menippean Satire into a racy, witty, pungent form ideally suited to the debunking activities with which L is most associated, and which are his most important bequest; his influence on these lines extends from Sir Thomas MORE and Erasmus (?1466-1536) to the dialogue-based SATIRES of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and others. The Lucianic Dialogue of greatest sf interest is the Icaro-Menippus, in which Menippus, disgusted with the fruitless animadversions of Earthly philosophers, acquires a pair of wings and flies first to the MOON, whence he is able to get a literal (i.e., visual) perspective on the nature of mankind's follies, and second to Olympus, where he meets Jupiter and watches that god deal with men's prayers (which arrive fartlike through huge vents). Jupiter proves moderately venal, but does in the end threaten to destroy the acrimonious philosophers who drove Menippus to flight. Other Dialogues of interest include the Charon, Timon, the 26 Dialogues of the Gods and the Dialogues of the Dead.Though less important, the prose fictions are vital proto sf. The True History - taking off from the numerous unlikely travellers' tales that proliferated at the time - is an extremely enjoyable and frequently scatological debunking exercise. L travels with 50 companions to the Moon, where they become embroiled in a space war; they then fly past the Sun and back to Earth, where they land in the sea and are soon swallowed by an enormous whale, from which they escape and visit various ISLANDS, where L's fertile imagination piles marvel upon lunatic marvel. With regard to fantasy and the spirit of romance, The True History is detumescent. Its influence extends to Francois RABELAIS and Jonathan SWIFT. Lucius, or The Ass is important as a cognate of or original for Apuleius's The Golden Ass (cAD200; vt Metamorphoses), about a magician's helper who is turned into an ass, suffers much, and is finally retransformed by a goddess. Lucius's picaresque adventures, and the earthy manner of their telling, provided models for picaresque counterattacks on idealistic fiction from Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) onwards.L is vital to that somewhat problematic line of descent of prose fictions which leads eventually to what we might legitimately think of as sf proper. Though he has often been misunderstood as being himself a romancer, he was in fact a consistent (and often savage) debunker of the idiom and ideals of romance. His attitude to the FANTASTIC VOYAGES of his supposed descendants would not have been that of the typical proud father.There are various translations, the earliest in English being A Dialog of the Poet Lucyan (trans 1530 UK); The Complete Works of Lucian (trans in 4 vols 1905 UK) is useful. [JC]About the author: "Lucian's True History as SF" by S.C. Fredericks in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, vol 3, part 1, Mar 1976. LUCIAN Pseudonym of a UK writer whose 1920: Dips into the Near Future (1917 The Nation; coll of linked stories 1918 chap) sharply examines a UK inherently deformed by years of unending war. [JC] LUCIE-SMITH, EDWARD [r] POETRY. LUDWIG, EDWARD W(ILLIAM) (1920- ) US writer and publisher whose The Mask of John Culon (1970) awakens its protagonist from SUSPENDED ANIMATION into a DYSTOPIA dominated by a repressive RELIGION. The 7 Shapes of Solomon Bean and 14 Other Marvelous Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy (coll 1983) contains some similar material. [JC] LUFTPIRAT UND SEIN LENKBARES LUFTSCHIFF, DER ["The Pirate of the Air and his Navigable Airship"] German DIME-NOVEL series, popularly known as Kapitan Mors der Luftpirat; it has no connection with a 1948 series of the same name. One of the most popular series of its day, its author or authors are unknown, but well known writers like Oskar Hoffmann (1866-? ) may have been involved; and, since its adventures take place alternately on Earth and in space, it may have been written by two people. 165 32pp issues were published 1908-11, at first by the Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft m.b.h. in Berlin and, retitled simply Der Luftpirat, from #94 by Verlag Moderner Lekture, also in Berlin. In 1914 #65-#86 were republished as #1-#22 of the series Der Fliegerteufel, published by Verlag P. Lehmann G.m.b.h. in Berlin. During WWI the series was proscribed by the military as "trash". DLUSLL anticipates many SPACE OPERAS, having an interplanetary background - there are numerous adventures with Venusians, Martians, crystal ROBOTS and MONSTERS of all kinds on the planets of the Solar System. Many issues have blueprints of Mors's spaceship on the back cover. Captain Mors, the Man with the Mask, is a Nemo-like fugitive from mankind who, with his crew of Indians, fights against evil. There is a case for calling this the first sf magazine. [FR] LUKENS, ADAM Diane DETZER. LUKODIANOV, ISAI (BORISOVICH) [r] Evgeny VOISKUNSKY. LULL, SUSAN [s] Robert L. FORWARD. LUNA, KRIS A house name used twice for CURTIS WARREN publications: Stella Radium Exchange (1952) by David O'BRIEN and Operation Orbit (1953) by William Henry Fleming BIRD. [JC] LUNA MONTHLY US FANZINE (1969-77), published by Frank and Ann F. Dietz from New Jersey, ed Ann F. Dietz, 67 issues, schedule varying from monthly to quarterly, stapled DIGEST-size, litho. LM was notable for its professionalism and its exceptionally thorough review coverage, for which it is a useful research tool. Reviews - some by Greg BEAR - were often good; Mark Purcell's column The International Scene was consistently well informed. Paul WALKER conducted interesting interviews with sf writers. [PN] LUNAN, DUNCAN (ALASDAIR) (1945- ) Scottish writer, generally of nonfiction books and articles in popular science, with a concentration on space exploration and related topics; titles include Man and the Stars (1974), New Worlds for Old (1979) and Man and the Planets (1983). The first of these presented and supported the hypothesis that historical radio anomalies might best be accounted for in terms of a ROBOT probe from an ALIEN culture parked at one of the Earth-Moon system's LAGRANGE POINTS; the anomalies have now been otherwise explained, but DL's exposition of his case, based on sound science rather than PSEUDO-SCIENCE, does not lack integrity. As an sf writer, DL began publishing stories with "Renaissance" for the Glasgow University Magazine in 1964, although his first fully professional sale, "The Moon of Thin Reality", did not appear until 1970 (in Gal). In Starfield: Science Fiction by Scottish Writers (anth 1989) DL demonstrated some of the range of sf currently being written in his home country. [JC/JGr] LUNDBERG, KNUD (1920- ) Danish writer whose Det olympiske hab (1955; trans Eiler Hansen and William Luscombe as The Olympic Hope1958 UK) suggests that the 1996 Olympics might be plagued by the use of DRUGS to improve the performance of athletes. [JC] LUNDIN, CLAES [r] SCANDINAVIA. LUNDWALL, SAM J(ERRIE) (1941- ) Swedish author, editor, critic, translator (of about 400 books, many sf), professional photographer, tv producer, film director, composer, singer (several records) and publisher. His first published work was an sf play for Swedish radio, broadcast in 1952 when he was 11 years old. Enormously active in sf FANDOM since 1956, SJL began selling stories in 1963. His first book was a collection, Visor i var tid (coll 1965). His next book was sold in SJL's own translation to ACE BOOKS: Science Fiction: fran begynnelsen till vara dagar (1969; exp trans SJL as Science Fiction: What It's All About 1971); it was one of the earlier studies of sf in English.Beginning 1970, SJL has written a number of novels, 4 of which have been translated into English. In Alice's World (1970 dos US; trans SJL as Alice, Alice! 1974 Sweden) a spaceship returning to an abandoned Earth finds it occupied by mythic and literary beings. SJL's SATIRE can be vicious, as in King Kong Blues (1974; trans SJL as AD 2018, or The King Kong Blues 1975 US), about advertising; at other times it is despondent - as in Bernhards magiska sommar ["Bernhard's Magical Summer"] (1974), the third in a trilogy beginning with No Time for Heroes (1970 dos US; trans SJL as Inga Hjaltar har Sweden 1972) and Bernhard the Conqueror (1973; trans SJL as Uppdrag i universum Sweden 1973) - or hilarious, as in Morkrets furste ["The Prince of Darkness"] (1975), probably his best novel, a burlesque of turn-of-the-century DIME NOVEL SF.From 1970 he edited the Askild & Karnekull sf line, thereby reviving Swedish publishing interest in sf. In 1973 he left to form his own house, Delta, which lasted until 1991, specializing in new and reprinted sf, averaging some 20 sf books a year. Under the Delta imprint SJL also edited the revived Jules Verne-Magasinet, Sweden's only professional sf magazine ( SCANDINAVIA), which in its first incarnation had run 1940-48; it is still published, now under his personal imprint, Sam J. Lundwall Fakta & Fantasi. SJL's careful BIBLIOGRAPHY of sf published in Sweden, both original and translated, is Bibliografi over science fiction & fantasy, 1741-1973 (1974), the 2nd revision of a work which originally appeared in 1962; the sequel is Bibliografi over science fiction & fantasy, 1974-83 (1984). His anthology series Den fantastiska romanen, 4 vols (1973-4), collects documents of sf history with critical comment. A later 18-vol anthology series ed SJL was Det hande i morgon ["It Happened Tomorrow"].Another work in English is Science Fiction: An Illustrated History (1979 US), which argues the primacy and greater sophistication of European over US sf. SJL's most recent book in English is The Penguin World Omnibus of Science Fiction (anth 1986) ed with Brian W. ALDISS, which in its eclectic, mostly non-US content could be seen as a footnote to his earlier argument.Among the dozen or so novels SJL has written since 1975, CRASH (1980) is about the adventures of a Swedish sf author in the US publishing world. His most ambitious project is a series (novels, stories, poems) set in a probabilistic ALTERNATE WORLD, a flat Earth facing dissolution into other probability formats; the scientific underpinning is rooted in quantum physics. Only 3 short stories from the series have been translated into English, "Nobody Here But Us Shadows" (1975 Gal), "Take Me Down the River" (1979) and "Time Everlasting" (1986). The central novels of the series are Fangelsestaden ["Prison City"] (1978), Flicka i fonster vid varldens kant ["Girl in the Window at the Edge of the World"] (1980), Tiden och Amelie ["Time and Amelie"] (1986), Gestalter i sten ["Figures in Stone"] (1988), Frukost bland ruinerna ["Breakfast in the Ruins"] (1988) and Vasja Ambartsurian ["Vasja Ambartsurian"] (1990).SJL has been a pivotal figure in Swedish sf as author, editor, publisher, entrepreneur and translator. He updated the SCANDINAVIA entry in this encyclopedia. [J-HH/PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; MYTHOLOGY. LUPOFF, RICHARD A(LLEN) (1935- ) US writer who worked in computers until he became a full-time writer in 1970. He was first active in sf fandom; the fanzine XERO, which he co-edited with his wife Pat, won a HUGO in 1963. A series of articles therein about COMICS later formed the core of All in Color for a Dime (1970), which RAL co-edited with Don Thompson. He contributed a long-running book-review column to the fanzine ALGOL. RAL is also an expert on Edgar Rice BURROUGHS, and as fiction editor of Canaveral Press in the early 1960s he supervised the republication of many of Burroughs's works. His Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965; rev 1968; rev 1975) is probably the best short introduction; Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision (1976) is also useful.After The Case of the Doctor who Had No Business, or The Adventure of the Second Anonymous Narrator (1966 chap), a RECURSIVE tale involving Burroughs and Arthur Conan DOYLE's Dr Watson, RAL's first published fiction was the novel One Million Centuries (1967; rev 1981), a colourful adventure of the FAR FUTURE in a pastiche style (the object being in this case Burroughs) which would mark most of his career. Pastiche and recursiveness feed naturally into one another, and it is at times difficult, despite his clear and abundant intelligence, to identify a unique RAL voice. His short stories include a series of parodies of other sf writers published in FANTASTIC under the pseudonym Ova Hamlet and assembled as The Ova Hamlet Papers (coll 1979 chap); several were earlier incorporated into Sacred Locomotive Flies (fixup 1971). He has also used the pseudonym Addison Steele. One of RAL's most notable stories is the satirical "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" (in Again, Dangerous Visions 1972 ed Harlan ELLISON), which eventually became the fine Space War Blues (fixup 1978), a nearly surrealist tale of race wars fought in space between human colonies; it and Sword of the Demon (1977), a novel based and styled on Japanese mythology, came very close to giving him a recognizable profile in the field, but his chameleon facility won out, and each new story bore a new facet usually borrowed with a grin. His other 1970s novels are various but insufficiently memorable. The Triune Man (1976) deals with the split personality of a comic-strip artist. OVERPOPULATION, ecocatastrophe and sf in-jokes are coped with in The Crack in the Sky (1976; vt Fool's Hill 1978 UK), shipwreck on a dehydrated planet in Sandworld (1976), and a female werewolf in Lisa Kane (1976).Two series dominated the 1980s. The Twin Planet books - Circumpolar! (1984) and Countersolar! (1986)-carry pastiche to the point of MAGIC REALISM. The first, in its depiction of an ALTERNATE-WORLD Earth - with a Symmesian hole ingeniously implanted in the centre of its doughnut shape ( HOLLOW EARTH) - has evoked comparisons with the work of James P. BLAYLOCK; historical figures star in a race across the gap. The second less interestingly moves into the 20th century and features a large cast of undifferentiated real people. The Sun's End sequence - Sun's End (1984) and Galaxy's End (1988) with a 3rd vol projected - is of greater interest, exploiting the fascination with Japanese culture that RAL first showed in Sword of the Demon in a complex SPACE-OPERA venue - although this does not prevent a certain amount of nostalgic pastiche of early-20th-century cultural modes and icons. But there still remains in RAL's work a sense of focus frustrated, of ambition deferred. [MJE/JC]Other works: Into the Aether (1974; rev as graph vt The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle and His Incredible Aether Flyer 1991 with Steve Stiles); The Return of Skull-Face (1977), "collaboration" with Robert E. HOWARD; Nebogipfel at the End of Time (1979 chap); Stroka Prospekt (1982 chap); The Digital Wristwatch of Philip K. Dick (dated 1985 but 1986 chap); Lovecraft's Book (1985); The Forever City (1988); The Comic Book Killer (1988), associational; Philip Jose Farmer's The Dungeon #1: The Black Tower * (1988) and #6: The Final Battle * (1990); Daniel M Pinkwater's Melvinge of the Metaverse Book 3: Night of the Living 'Gator (1992); The Digital Wristwatch of Philip K. Dick/Hyperprism (1994 dos).As Addison E. Steele: Two Buck Rogers tv ties, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century * (1978) and That Man on Beta * (1979).As Editor: The Reader's Guide to Barsoom and Amtor (anth 1963 chap); The Comic-Book Book (anth 1973) with Don Thompson; What If? #1: Stories that Should Have Won the Hugo (anth 1980) and its sequel, What If? #2 (anth 1981).See also: CITIES; CYBORGS; SUSPENDED ANIMATION. LURGAN, LESTER Pseudonym of UK writer Mabel Winfred Knowles (1875-1949), author of various popular novels including The League of the Triangle (1911). LL's sf novel, A Message from Mars * (1912), based on an 1899 play by Richard Ganthony, may have been used as well as the play in creating the film version, A MESSAGE FROM MARS (1913). The story deals with the effects on humans of the arrival of a messenger from MARS with words of good sense about our earthly dilemmas. [JC]See also: SATIRE. LUSTBADER, ERIC [r] Eric VAN LUSTBADER. LUTHER, RAY Arthur SELLINGS. LUXEMBOURG BENELUX. LYDECKEN, ARVID [r] FINLAND. LYDECKER, JOHN Stephen GALLAGHER. LYMINGTON, JOHN Pseudonym of UK writer John Newton Chance (1911-1983), prolific author of novels and stories, mostly detections, under his real name. His first novels of genre interest were two juvenile fantasies, The Black Ghost (1947) and The Dangerous Road (1948), both as by David C. Newton; a later sf novel, The Light Benders (1968), as by Jonathan Chance, is unremarkable. Under his own name he published the Bunst series of children's stories - Bunst and the Brown Voice (1950), Bunst the Bold (1950), Bunst and the Secret Six (1951) and Bunst and the Flying Eye (1953) - which deploy sf elements, though casually. His first novel as JL, later made into a film ( The NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT ), was The Night of the Big Heat (1959), about an alien INVASION, and much of his subsequent work constituted a set of variations on the theme of alien or natural menace to Earth, though not at the imaginative level of his predecessors (and likely models), John WYNDHAM and John CHRISTOPHER. JL's use of genuine science is minimal and most of his books (many of which feature MONSTERS) operate at the level of B-grade sf/horror films, where menace strikes unexpectedly in a lazy, rural setting. Some of the better titles of this sort are The Giant Stumbles (1960), Froomb! (1964) - probably his best single novel of societal collapse (the title is an acronym for fluid's running out of my brakes) - The Green Drift (1965), Ten Million Years to Friday (1967), and Give Daddy the Knife, Darling (1969). He wrote with some verve but little style, and there are many cliches of character. His short stories, collected in The Night Spiders (coll 1964), are routine. It might be said that JL's main deficiency as a writer of sf was a lack of interest in the forward thrust of the genre; he was, at heart, a HORROR writer. [JC/PN]Other works: The Grey Ones (1960); The Coming of the Strangers (1961); A Sword Above the Night (1962), assembled with The Grey Ones as (omni 1978 US); The Sleep Eaters (1963); The Screaming Face (1963); The Night Spiders (1964); The Star Witches (1965); The Nowhere Place (1969); The Year Dot (1972); The Hole in the World (1974); A Spider in the Bath (1975); The Laxham Haunting (1976); Starseed on Eye Moor (1977); The Waking of the Stone (1967); A Caller from Overspace (1979); Voyage of the Eighth Mind (1980); The Power Ball (1981); The Terror Version (1982); The Vale of Sad Banana (1984). LYNCH, (JOHN GILBERT) BOHUN (1884-1928) UK writer and caricaturist in whose Menace from the Moon (1925) - which blends interplanetary, LOST-WORLD and future- WAR themes - descendants of a MOON colony established by 17th-century Europeans attack the Earth with heat-rays. It contains many references to the works of Bishop John WILKINS. [JE]Other work: A Muster of Ghosts (anth 1924; vt The Best Ghost Stories 1924 US), ed.See also: INVASION. LYNCH, FRANCES D.G. COMPTON. LYNDS, DENNIS (1924- ) US editor and writer whose sf consists of 2 sf adventures as by Michael Collins - Lukan War (1969) and The Planets of Death (1970) - and several late contributions under the house name Maxwell Grant to the The Shadow book sequence, earlier titles in which had been mainly reprints of lead novels from the pulp magazine The Shadow (1931-49), mostly by Walter B. Gibson (also as Grant). DL's additions followed on from Gibson's last contribution to the series (Return of the Shadow * [1963]): The Shadow Strikes * (1964), Shadow Beware * (1965), Cry Shadow! * (1965), The Shadow's Revenge * (1965), Mark of the Shadow * (1966), Shadow Go Mad * (1966), The Night of the Shadow * (1966) and Destination Moon * (1967). [JC] LYNN, ELIZABETH A. (1946- ) US writer who began publishing work of genre interest with "We All Have to Go" for The Berkley Showcase (anth 1976) ed Victoria Schochet and John SILBERSACK. This was assembled with other early work in The Woman who Loved the Moon and Other Stories (coll 1981). Her early sf stories and her first novel, A Different Light (1978), share certain assumptions about the nature of the Universe, including the existence of HYPERSPACE, used here both to facilitate storytelling and as an existential cusp for her protagonists - like the cancer-stricken artist in the novel, who must decide whether or not to seize the day by travelling where he needs to go by hyperspace, even though such travel will mortally intensify his illness. In her second and best-received novel, The Sardonyx Net (1981), EAL applies a similar ironic torsion to a tale whose moral premises seem initially unproblematic - slavery is bad for a planet, drugs are bad for society, sadism is bad for the soul - but which become significantly less clearcut in the telling. Although the slavery which obtains in one mercenary planet in the Galaxy is never justified, its operations are seen as complexly interactive; and the sadism of the captain and slavetrader turns out to express so vividly his violated inner state that he almost becomes the protagonist of the book. Most of her remaining work - including the effective Chronicles of Tornor sequence, comprising Watchtower (1979), The Dancers of Arun (1979) and The Northern Girl (1980) - has been fantasy, and as the 1980s progressed she wrote less and less sf. Given the sophisticated use to which she has put conventional sf-adventure plots and venues, this slow departure seems most regrettable. [JC]Other works: The Red Hawk (1984 chap); The Silver Horse (1984), a fantasy for children; Tales from a Vanished Country (coll 1990), stories all previously published in earlier volumes. LYNN, GREY (? - ) UK writer (possibly pseudonymous) whose The Return of Karl Marx (1941) features the rising of the philosopher from his grave by unexplained means. After exposure to the degenerate UK of 1940 he returns, sadly, to his place of rest. [JC] LYON, JOHN Christopher EVANS. LYON, LYMAN R. [s] L. Sprague DE CAMP. LYON, RICHARD K. Andrew J. OFFUTT. LYONS, DELPHINE C. Evelyn E. SMITH. LYTTON (EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER), FIRST BARON (1803-1873) UK writer, known as Edward Bulwer until 1838, when he became Sir Edward Bulwer. He became Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1843 when he succeeded to the Knebworth estate on his mother's death. His name is often rendered as Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, or simply as Bulwer Lytton; the standard editions of his collected works give his name as Lord Lytton. He became Colonial Secretary in 1858-9 (he signed the documents creating British Columbia and Queensland), and was raised to the peerage as First Baron Lytton in 1866.As a writer, he was most significant for such fashionable and trendsetting novels as Pelham (1828), though he is best remembered for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). He was versatile and prolific in several genres, and his collected works fill over 110 volumes. His powerful interest in the occult, or more specifically in doctrines associated with the Rosicrucians, surfaces throughout his work, becoming explicit in Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story (1862; rev 1863), which feature ruminations on the proper route to the attainment of the elixir of life and on other occult themes. The Haunted and the Haunters, or The House and the Brain (1859 Blackwood's Magazine; 1905 chap) is a more convincing haunted-house tale which qualifies as marginal sf through its quasiscientific explanations in terms of mesmerism (animal magnetism). His sf novel is The Coming Race (1871; vt Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 1972 US), a UTOPIA set in an underground LOST WORLD inhabited by an evolved form of Homo sapiens, larger and wiser than surface dwellers. This race derives its moral and physical virtue from vril, an electromagnetic form of energy of universal utility which fuels flying machines and automata, and even makes telepathy possible. (The UK beef-tea Bovril took its name from vril.) Females of the Vril-ya are superior to men, a circumstance which shapes the book's thin plot. A human visitor from the surface is condemned to death for eugenic reasons but two women fancy him, taking the initiative as is normal for Vril-ya; with the aid of one of them he escapes to tell his tale. He understands little of his superiors' lives, however, and masters nothing of their arts and sciences. Soon, it is clear, the world above will be visited in turn and Homo sapiens will be exterminated. Lytton's lack of horror at science, and the professionalism of his text, help explain the extremely wide influence of The Coming Race, which is one of the seminal sf texts before the age of H.G. WELLS. [JC]Other works: Asmodeus at Large (1833); Godolphin (1833); The Pilgrims of the Rhine (coll 1834), which contains "The Fallen Star", perhaps the first story to consider primitive Man from an ethnographic point of view; The Student (coll 1835).About the author: Strange Stories, and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction (1971) by Robert Lee Wolff; Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (1990) by Marie Roberts.See also: ANONYMOUS SF AUTHORS; DIME-NOVEL SF; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; HOLLOW EARTH; POWER SOURCES; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; PSEUDO-SCIENCE. |