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Friday 17 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 ...
Green, Terence M
(1947- ) Canadian teacher and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Of Children in the Foliage" in Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1979 (anth 1979) edited by Morris Wolfe; the story was gathered with further lean and subtle tales in The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind (coll 1987). In his short fiction Green, like many Canadian writers, tenders a vision which might be called melancholy humanism. His first novel, ...
Collections
With sf/fantasy long a subject for academic study, especially in the USA, many major institutional collections have been built up, a process which has supplemented but in no sense supplanted the large number of private collections amassed by fans and scholars. From the first, Genre SF has tended to be published in formats significantly (and foolishly) slighted in the accession policies of every category of institutional library – from university libraries to ...
Wettenhovi-Aspa, Sigurd
(1870-1946) Finnish nationalist philosopher, painter and author, born Sigurd Wetterhoff-Asp; as early as 1910 he had begun to advocate the philological argument that all Indo-European languages have a common Finnish origin via Egypt, which was founded by Finns (see Linguistics); he was almost certainly the first, and perhaps the only, writer to suggest this. Wettenhovi-Aspa is of sf interest for an English-language novel, The Diamondking of Sahara ...
Dennis, Geoffrey
(1892-1963) UK author whose fantasy Harvest in Poland (1925; rev 1931) bases its augurs of a grim future for Europe on the decay of civilization demonstrated by the horrors of World War One, in which he served. The Devil and X Y Z (1931) with Hilary Aidan St George Saunders, writing together as Barum Browne [for Saunders see Francis Beeding], is a supernatural thriller featuring, as does ...
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 ...