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Tuesday 22 April 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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 21 April 2025
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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Kealing, Ethel Black
(1877-1960) US poet and author of one Lost Race novel, Desra of the Egyptians: A Romance of the Earlier Centuries (1910); it is set in Egypt. [JC]
Simenon, Georges
(1903-1989) Belgian-born author, in France 1925-1945 and 1955-1957, famous over his enormously prolific career mainly for the seventy-five or so Maigret novels about a Paris-based police inspector, but also for what he called romans durs: 100 or more savagely intense studies of class-ridden men – women hardly feature as protagonists in his work – who have been driven to and beyond their psychological limits, and who break. Of these novels, ...
Fisher, Catherine
(1957- ) Welsh poet and author, active in the former capacity from the 1980s; her first novel, The Conjuror's Game (1990), was the first of many Young Adult fantasies, most of them set in Secondary Worlds [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. She is of some sf interest for two series. The Incarceron sequence beginning with Incarceron ...
Bornefeld, William
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, Time and Light (1996) depicts a Dystopian post-holocaust society in which all visual arts are forbidden, and the population is required to ingest daily a pharmacopoeia of Drugs which combine the effects of Viagra and Prozac and more; the protagonist discovers a horde of forbidden photographs from the twentieth century, which stirs his mind and leads to ...
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 ...