David Langford

David Langford has been writing in and around the science fiction field since the mid-1970s, and has accumulated an almost embarrassing number of awards. Indeed, with 24 Hugo Awards, he has the largest arsenal of these rocket trophies outside the USA and the second largest in the world. Other accolades include two British SF Association Awards, one each for fiction and nonfiction; the European SF Award for The Science in Science Fiction, shared with co-authors Peter Nicholls and Brian Stableford; the Fanzine Activity Achievement Award; the Nova Award; and the Skylark Award. He has been a guest of honour at many SF conventions in Europe and America.

Born in old South Wales in 1953, Langford read physics at Brasenose College, Oxford, from 1971 to 1974, and worked for some years as a nuclear physicist at the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment -- mercilessly parodied in his novel The Leaky Establishment, whose recent reissues included an appreciative introduction by Terry Pratchett. In 1980 he became a full-time freelance writer. He is married and lives in Reading, England, with his wife Hazel, numerous computers and many thousands of books.

Further Langford fiction includes one hard SF novel, The Space Eater, and two recent, career-spanning story collections: He Do the Time Police in Different Voices assembles his SF parodies and pastiches, while "straight" stories are collected in Different Kinds of Darkness -- named for the Hugo-winning title piece. Nonfiction ranges from his 1979 debut book War in 2080: the Future of Military Technology to the acclaimed SF and fantasy criticism collected in The Complete Critical Assembly, The Silence of the Langford, Up Through an Empty House of Stars, and his 80,000 words of entries for John Clute's and John Grant's The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, another Hugo winner of which Langford was a contributing editor. Somewhere in the murky region between fiction and nonfiction is his tour-de-force of Victorian UFOlogy An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World, 1871....

He has been a regular columnist for the top-selling British magazine SFX since its launch in 1995, and for the prestigious SF showcase Interzone since 1992; he also contributes to Fortean Times, New Scientist and other journals. His monthly SF newsletter Ansible has been appearing since 1979 and has gained a large readership for its quirky, irreverent view of the genre. As an editor, he is most proud of compiling an exhaustive collection of one favourite author's unpublished work as Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek.

Langford has collaborated with his friend John Grant on two outrageous genre spoofs, mocking the excesses of disaster novels in Earthdoom! (published by BeWrite Books) and of horror in Guts: A Comedy of Manners.

Much more about David Langford, with extensive samples of his writing, can be found on his personal website at ansible.co.uk.

EARTHDOOM! by David Langford and John Grant

The trouble with Earthdoom! is that you really have to grope through a host of books with titles like Tapeworm! and Sludge! and plots like – well, like episodes of Earthdoom! to appreciate just what Langford and Grant are sending up. By then, of course, either your brain has rotted away from disuse or you're so paranoid that the next time the gerbils nip your finger you come down with psychosomatic rabies and infect half the neighbourhood. Even if you forego the study of literary influences, however, you'll still enjoy Earthdoom! You won't, of course, be able to read another Disaster Novel without giggling (but don't you, anyway?) as what we have here is a scenario for just about every end-of-the world novel possible, starting with the earth tilting on its axis and taking in Hitler cloning himself on a Devonshire farm, the Loch Ness Monster, comets and Horrible Slimy Aliens on a collision course with earth and sub-critical-mass bits of plutonium doing likewise in the London Underground – and I won't even mention the lemmings and the superglue save to say that you'll probably never want to go to the lavatory again. It's all held together with a plot line involving Death, the Antichrist, various sets of incompetent scientists as two-fistedly gung-ho as any Doc Smith character (but randier) and numerous knock-knock jokes ... If you don't get a copy of this for your collection of skiffy blockbusters there isn't much hope for you. – Andy Sawyer, Paperback Inferno Paperback ISBN 1-904224-11-8 £9.80 eBook ISBN 1-904224-09-6 £1.00 CD-rom ISBN 1-904224-10-X £7.50

Please click the image for direct purchasing information