David Langford (born April 10, 1953, in Newport, Monmouthshire) is a British science fiction author and critic. He publishes a science fiction newsletter Ansible, which he describes as "The SF Private Eye".

His foremost job was as a physicist at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire, an experience which he late uproariously parodied in The Leaky Establishment.

Literary career
Around fiction, he is virtually all noted for his parodies. The 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. Both novels, parodying disaster novels and horror, respectively, come Earthdoom! and Guts!, both co-written by using John Grant.

His novella An Account Of A Meeting With Denizens Of Another World 1871, is an entertaining account of a UFO encounter, as had by the Victorian, but is notable primarily for the framing story, within which Langford claimed to use observed a manuscript in an old desk. This has led a select few UFOlogists to believe a story is echt. Langford freely admits a story is made-up while asked - however, when he notes, "Journalists usually don't ask."

The collection of his nonfictional prose & humorous operate, ''Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man, was published in 1992 by NESFA Press. This wwhen incorporated into the watch-higher collection, consisting of 47 nonfictional prose pieces & threesome short stories, & published as The Silence of the Langford in 1996.

His 2004 collection Different Kinds of Darkness is a compilation of 36 of his shorter, non-parodic science fiction pieces, a title story of which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2001. He besides experienced a single good science fiction novel published around 1982, The Space Eater.

Langford has won many more Hugo Awards, mostly for his fan journalism: 19 for Best Fan Writer, 5 for Ansible when Best Fanzine, and an additional for Ansible when Best Semiprozine. He has, around amount, Twenty-six Hugo Awards.

David Langford too diarrhethe a "tiny and informally run software company" sustaining science fiction writer Christopher Priest, called Ansible Information. He has likewise written the regular column for SFX magazine since its launch in 1995. A tenth-anniversary collection one columns appeared around 2005: The SEX Column and other misprints.

Basilisks
The total of his stories come placed within the future containing images, colloquially known as "basilisks", which crash a human mind by triggering thoughts that the mind is physically or even logically incapable of mentation. A number one one stories was "BLIT" (Interzone, 1988); others include "What Happened at Cambridge IV" (Digital Dreams, 1990); "comp.basilisk FAQ" (Nature, 1999), and a Hugo-winning "Different Kinds of Darkness" (F&SF, 2000).

the idea, a form of the motif of harmful sensation, has appeared elsewhere; in one of his novels, Ken MacLeod has characters explicitly mention (and worry all about encountering) a "Langford Visual Hack". Similar information, too mentioning Langford by title, feature around novels by Greg Egan and Charles Stross. a related idea, the fracter'', the fractal image by using psycho-psychotropic results, is recognized through it's the key plot element within Ian McDonald's 1994 novel Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone.