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Saturday 7 September 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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Lord, Karen
(1968- ) Barbados-born author, partly in Canada from late childhood, though she has continued to spend considerable time in Barbados. Her first novel, Redemption in Indigo (2010), is a fantasy Twice-Told from a West African folktale; the novel describes in wryly Feminist terms the attempts of an abandoned husband to restore the status quo; but his powerful wife has been granted by spirit figures a Magic ...
Story, Jack Trevor
(1917-1991) UK author who remains best known for his first novel, The Trouble with Harry (1949), not sf, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1955. The rumours that he wrote several of the Volsted Gridban sf novels are unverified, but certainly he did produce many pseudonymous books over the first decade or so of his career, including several Westerns, all nonfantastic. His ...
Burnet, W Hodgson
(1873-1933) UK architect and author, whose Parodies include Quite So Stories (coll 1918), which makes mild fun of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (coll 1902). In Gullible's Travels in Little-Brit (1920), a giant Gulliver from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) (see Great and Small; ...
Alexander, Holmes
(1906-1985) US columnist and biographer, author of The Spirit of '76: A Political Novel of the Near Future (1966), a Near Future satire on American politics in 1976. [JC]
Tower, Washington L
(? -? ) US author whose Interior World: A Romance Illustrating a New Hypothesis of Terrestrial Organization [for full title see Checklist] (1885) is a Hollow Earth tale after the fashion of John Cleves Symmes; its interest is perhaps diminished by the protagonist's discovery that the interior world is uninhabited. A crank nonfiction essay on ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...