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Monday 17 February 2025
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.
Site updated on 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Beagle, Peter S
US fantasy author (1939- ) who has written no sf, but whose influence has extended beyond the range of his actual writing. He is given a full entry in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy [see under links below]. In the present encyclopedia, references to Beagle may be found under Chesley Awards; Eastercon; F&SF; ...
Prince of Darkness
Film (1987). Alive. Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Martin Quatermass (Carpenter). Cast includes Lisa Blount, Jameson Parker, Donald Pleasence and Victor Wong. 101 minutes. Colour. / An old priest, guardian of a vat containing Satan as a green liquid, dies. Young physicists are brought to the derelict church by another worried priest (Pleasence) to analyse the strange powers here. The church is surrounded by bag ladies and vagrants (one being ...
Sturgeon, Theodore
(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new first name; Argyll (1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter Sturgeon wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these name changes; partner of Jayne Tannehill 1976-1985. Certainly Sturgeon early suffered or ...
Swirsky, Rachel
(1982- ) US editor, poet and author, focusing in the latter capacity almost entirely on work in shorter forms; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Scene from a Dystopia" in Subterranean #4 (2006). By 2013 she had already released nearly fifty stories, almost all of them bristling with transgressive "violations" of the genre purities of the previous century; her work represents a strenuous and at times stringent argument for ...
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 ...