page_title: David Langford
section_title: Fiction
hierarchical_section_title: David Langford / Literary career / Fiction
context_page_description: David Rowland Langford is a British author, editor and critic, largely active within the science fiction field. He publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter Ansible.
context_section_description: As a writer of fiction, Langford is noted for his parodies.  A collection of short stories, parodying various science fiction, fantasy fiction and detective story writers has been published as He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (2003, incorporating the earlier and much shorter 1988 parody collection The Dragonhiker's Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune's Edge: Odyssey Two).  Two novels, parodying disaster novels and horror, respectively, are Earthdoom! and Guts, both co-written with John Grant.
  The novelette An Account of a Meeting with Denizens of Another World 1871, is an account of a UFO encounter, as experienced by a Victorian; in its framing story Langford claims to have found the manuscript in an old desk (the story's narrator, William Robert Loosley, is a genuine ancestor of Langford's wife). 
  This has led some UFOlogists to believe the story is genuine (including the US author Whitley Strieber, who referred to the 1871 incident in his novel Majestic).  Langford freely admits the story is fictional when asked — but, as he notes, "Journalists usually don't ask."
  Langford also had one serious science fiction novel published in 1982, The Space Eater. The 1984 novel The Leaky Establishment satirises the author's experiences at Aldermaston. His 2004 collection Different Kinds of Darkness is a compilation of 36 of his shorter, non-parodic science fiction pieces, the title story of which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2001.
caption: David Langford at Worldcon 2005 in Glasgow, with two Hugo Awards.
exif: {}