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Saturday 18 May 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Mitchell, Adrian
(1932-2008) UK author, perhaps best known for his poetry; many of the children's poems assembled in Nothingmas Day (coll 1984 chap) with John Lawrence (1933- ) are Fantasy. His second novel, The Bodyguard (1970), is the deathbed narrative of a representative figure of a Near Future UK, a paramilitary bodyguard whose reminiscences of his various jobs defending the totalitarian state ...
Falls, Cyril
(1888-1971) Irish-born soldier, academic and author writing chiefly on military matters, in the UK from adolescence; he was in active service throughout World War One, became very well known as a war correspondent during World War Two. Of sf interest is his only novel, The Man for the Job: A Story for Commissars (1947), a Satire on Communism in which the ...
Bellamy, Edward
(1850-1898) US author and journalist, the latter from 1871, when he abandoned the practice of law before having properly begun it; no lawyers exist in the 2000 CE of his most famous work, the Utopia Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888) and its sequel, Equality (1897), whose influence in the nineteenth century was enormous. His early works of fiction were Gothic; sentimental and labouredly influenced by Nathaniel ...
Benson, E F
(1867-1940) UK author, brother of A C Benson and Robert Hugh Benson, and by far the most prolific of the three as far as fiction is concerned, with dozens of attractive, realistic novels and romances to his credit, and a number of novels involving the supernatural. The most telling of these is perhaps his first in this mode, The Judgment Books (1895), which shows the influence of Oscar ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...