SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 5 December 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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Zubrin, Robert
(1952- ) US aerospace engineer and author who in his nonfiction has been a strong advocate of the exploration and exploitation of Mars, as articulated in The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must (1996; rev 2011) with Richard Wagner and other texts, all advocating the "Mars Direct" programme, which describes the use of available Technology to move toward the ultimate ...
Catherall, Arthur
(1906-1980) UK author for Young Adult audiences, active from the 1930s under a variety of names, none of which were used for sf or fantasy; he is best known for his S S Bulldog sequence about a tugboat captain and crew menaced by a Villain with almost (but not quite) supernatural abilities. Catherall's only identified sf novel is The Flying Submarine (?1943), an adventure tale whose villain steals two ...
Miller, Marc
(1947- ) US Game designer, inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame in 1981. Miller was an important figure in the early development of the US Role Playing Game and Wargame industries, both as a founder of Game Designers' Workshop – one of the earliest companies enthusiastic about creating science-fictional games – and as the designer ...
Brown, Peter
(1979- ) US illustrator and author whose Wild Robot fiction sequence beginning with The Wild Robot (2016) combines Children's SF with Animal Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The central character is a female Robot whose Transportation box is initially washed up on the shore ...
Véron, Pierre
(1831-1900) French journalist and author, some of whose sketches and tales are of sf interest, including those assembled as The Merchants of Health and Other Fantastic Stories (coll trans Brian Stableford from various sources 2015). The title story – originally published as Les Marchands de Santé (1862) – is a Satire on the medical profession set on a fantasticated planet; ...
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 ...