Line #21 Creator/DavidLangford


1	David Rowland Langford (born 10 April 1953) is a Welsh science fiction writer and fan. He has won a UsefulNotes/HugoAward for his short story "Different Kinds of Darkness", and 27 Hugo Awards in Best Fan Writer and related categories.
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3	Many of his short stories are collected in ''He Do the Time Police in Different Voices'' (parodies) and ''Different Kinds of Darkness'' (more serious works). The latter includes his BLIT stories, set in a future transformed by the discovery of the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique, which creates computer-generated images that hack into the brain through the visual cortex and cause brain damage and even death in anybody who sees them. ("Different Kinds of Darkness" is itself a BLIT story.)
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5	His novels include ''The Space Eater'' (straight science fiction), ''The Leaky Establishment'' (a satirical novel inspired by his time as a physicist at the government's Atomic Weapons Research Establishment), and, co-written with John Grant: ''Guts!'' (a spoof of creature-horror novels) and ''Earthdoom!'' (a spoof of disaster novels in which every possible disaster, from alien invasion to nuclear catastrophe to an army of cloned Hitlers, happens simultaneously).
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7	He has had a monthly column in ''[[http://www.sfx.co.uk/ SFX]]'' magazine since it started, and used to have a column in ''Magazine/WhiteDwarf'' magazine (back when it was a general gaming magazine, and not a Creator/GamesWorkshop house organ). He also runs the sf newszine, ''[[http://news.ansible.co.uk/Ansible.html Ansible]]'', which he describes as a science fiction version of ''Magazine/PrivateEye'', and which now also appears as a column in ''Magazine/{{Interzone}}'' magazine.
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9	!!David Langford's works with their own trope pages include:
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11	* See ''Literature/{{Temps}}'' for tropes from the short stories "Leaks" and "If Looks Could Kill"
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13	!!David Langford's other works provide examples of:
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15	* AchievementsInIgnorance: The short-story "Different Kinds of Darkness" features a group of grade school children finding a less-powerful BLIT image ("The Trembler") and making a game of endurance contests with it, [[spoiler: which ultimately enables one to withstand "The Parrot" long enough to keep anyone else from seeing it.]]
16	* AlienInvasion: ''Earthdoom!''
17	* ApocalypseHitler: One of the many apocalypses featured in ''Earthdoom!''.
18	* AntiquatedLinguistics: In a mock-report of Britain's first science fiction convention, supposedly held in 1882 and featuring Creator/JulesVerne as the guest of honour.
19	* BrownNote: The "basilisk" images of the BLIT series.
20	* ConstrainedWriting: "[[http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/drabbles.html A Surprisingly Common Omission]]" is a drabble written without using the letter E.
21	* FantasyTwist: In ''The Leaky Establishment'', when Roy Tappen is trying to smuggle his accidentally stolen plutonium ''back'' into the NUTC, he briefly fantasises about claiming to have wrestled it from a Russian spy and being hailed as a hero. This fantasy rapidly shifts towards being asked serious questions about the supposed Russian spy, leading inevitably to being cast into the darkness with "UNEMPLOYABLE" tattooed on his forhead. Later fantasies are even worse, mostly ending with Britain becoming a radioactive wasteland, ''and'' [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking he gets fired.]]
22	* GoMadFromTheRevelation: This happens subsequently to death with the [=BLIT=]s.
23	* LiteraryAllusionTitle: "He do the time police in different voices" is a misquote from Creator/CharlesDickens' ''Literature/OurMutualFriend''.
24	* MyLocal: In ''The Leaky Establishment'', the pub local to the protagonist's workplace is The Wheatsheaf. The nuclear weapon scientists who make up the clientele have taken one look at the sign (which presumably looks something like [[http://1pumplane.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/wheatsheaf-sign.jpg this]]) and renamed it "The Mushroom Cloud".
25	** Langford also contributed a story to the anthology ''Literature/FablesFromTheFountain''.
26	* ObstructiveBureaucrat: All over the place in ''The Leaky Establishment''.
27	* OurWormholesAreDifferent: ''The Space Eater''
28	* RightForTheWrongReasons: Tappen's EurekaMoment near the end of ''The Leaky Establishment'' turns out to be this.
29	* TheStarsAreGoingOut: ''[[http://ansible.co.uk/books/tse.html The Space Eater]]'' has a third of the stars in the sky wiped out by an early experiment with wormholes.
30	* StupidJetpackHitler: Time-travelling Hitler is a character in ''Earthdoom!''
31	* ThereAreTwoKindsOfPeopleInTheWorld: In ''The Leaky Establishment'' there are two kinds of nuclear weapons scientists: hawks ("We're gonna build something that'll wipe out the bad guys!") and ostriches ("Gosh, this is an interesting application of the theory, let's not think about why we're doing it"). (Well, three types: hawks, ostriches and [[CloudCuckooLander Roger Pell]].) The main character is an ostrich.
32	* ThreeLawsCompliant: At a 1985 convention, Langford gave a guest of honour speech in which he detailed what he suspected the Three Laws would actually be:
33	##A robot will not harm authorised Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
34	##A robot will obey the orders of authorised personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
35	##A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.
36	* {{Whatevermancy}}: "Not Ours to See", a spoof story about Dagon Smythe, OccultDetective, features a discussion of various methods of divination, each with a -mancy name. They get increasingly ridiculous, before ending with the art of predicting the future by ''doing absolutely nothing''. Which is, of course, [[spoiler:dormancy]].
37	* YouClonedHitler: in ''Earthdoom!''

Context Creator / DavidLangford