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Friday 22 September 2023
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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Edmonds, Harry
(1891-1989) UK author, in active service during World War One, who is of sf interest for several adventure tales and of some Near-Future novels, beginning with The North Sea Mystery: A Story of Naval Intelligence Work (1930), which features land-launched torpedoes that threaten to sink the entire Royal Navy. In The Riddle of the Straits (1931), a Future War story set in ...
Hughes, Rhys
(1966- ) Welsh author of a very large number of stories to date, his stated life's ambition being to create an interlocking sequence of 1000 tales, the whole to comprise a sequence now called Pandora's Bluff. In 2022 he announced completion of this project, with some stories yet to be published. Most of this work, beginning with "Cutting Back" for Peeping Tom in 1993, runs a gamut of the fantastic in literature from scattergun ...
Wilson, Anna
(1954- ) UK-born author, now in the US. Both of her novels are sharp Feminist parables. Altogether Elsewhere (1985) depicts a Near-Future feminist vigilante backlash against male violence. Hatching Stones (1991) portrays a society in which males largely abandon females when Genetic Engineering allows them to Clone ...
Skinner, B F
Working name of Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904-1990), US psychologist and author whose vehemently argued (and as vigorously refuted) brand of behaviourism dominated that version of Psychology for many years in America, and provides the basic tenets for his one published work of fiction, Walden Two (1948), which depicts a Utopia whose inhabitants grow up as successful experiments in behavioural engineering on lines ...
Caswell, Brian
(1954- ) Welsh-born song-writer, teacher and author, in Australia from the age of 12. His sf and fantasy work of interest is all written for a Young Adult audience, beginning with Merryll of the Stones (1989), a Timeslip tale whose protagonist ends up in ancient Wales; Dreamslip (1994) is similar. A Cage of Butterflies (1992) is a ...
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 ...