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Monday 13 January 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.

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Noble, William

(? -? ) UK author of Consternation in Mars: Dispatches of Faynt Dams, Ex Mock M.P. (1932), a Satire on Near Future England conducted in an eighteenth-century idiom; War is imminent. [JC]

(? - ) US author whose Near Future Satire on American Politics Teenocracy (1969) may miss the mark in assuming that the land will be ruled in 1990 by the eponymous cohort, which has disenfranchised senior citizens. The world of Teenocracy is due to be further transformed by Genetic Engineering, ...

Dicks, Terrance

(1935-2019) UK scriptwriter, editor, and author, best known for his involvement in various capacities over many years with Doctor Who (see this entry for more details). His career as scriptwriter for this BBC television series began in the late 1960s with rewrite work on episodes 3-6 of Brian Hayles's season-six storyline The Seeds of Death (25 January-1 March 1969), later in the season he was jointly credited with ...

Seidel, Frederick

(1936- ) US poet active from the end of the 1950s, his Poetry being highly contentious from the beginning of his career when his first book, Final Solutions (coll 1963 chap), was rejected for publication after winning a YMCA-funded contest judged by Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell. The three judges resigned in protest; and Seidel's at times scatologically Satirical response to American ...

Beachcomber

A House Name of the UK newspaper The Daily Express for its By the Way column (formerly a venue for unsigned humorous pieces in The Globe 1903-1909, with P G Wodehouse as the department's assistant editor and, from August 1904, chief editor). Its first Express incarnation, from 1917 to 1919, was a society-doings column written by Major John Arbuthnot (1875-1950), who inaugurated the Beachcomber ...

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 ...