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Wednesday 11 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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Oldham, June
(? - ) UK author of The Raven Waits (1979), a fantasy about Beowulf; and a Young Adult tale, Foundling (1995; vt Found 1996), set in a Near Future America where fears of Overpopulation have led to punitive controls over reproduction. The young protagonist, exiled to a countryside inhabited by Gothic figures of menace ...
Buckley, Christopher
(1952- ) US author – son of William F Buckley Jr (1925-2008), himself the author of some fantasy but not sf – whose novels have been Satires of contemporary American life which sometimes edge towards the fantastic. Typical of these is Little Green Man (1999), in which the media pundit protagonist believes he has been abducted by Aliens but has in fact been abducted by a government agency, so ...
Wertenbaker, G Peyton
(1907-1968) US editor and author, one of the pioneers of Hugo Gernsback's development of Scientifiction. Wertenbaker came from a literary and professional family; his brother Charles Wertenbaker (1901-1955) was a renowned journalist and his niece is the noted playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker (1946- ). His first story, written when he was still fifteen, "The Man from the Atom" (August 1923 ...
MacPherson, Donald
Pseudonym of UK psychologist George Humphrey (1889-1966) – who held various academic posts in Canada and the USA 1916-1947 and later became professor of psychology at Oxford – for two sf novels influenced by Freudian Psychology. Go Home, Unicorn (1935) is a Scientific Romance set in Montreal, in which the life of a research Scientist – loved by two women, one ...
Vaughan, Thomas Hunter
(? -? ) UK author, seemingly active only during the teens of the twentieth century; of some sf interest is The Gates of the Past (1911), a tale of Reincarnation in which Ancient Egyptians manifest themselves in London under the sway of an occult psychologist/magus named Ramon Cafara. [JC]
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 ...