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Friday 13 September 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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Papp, Desiderio
(1895-1993) Hungarian historian of science, in Europe until forced to flee by Nazi Germany, and mostly in Argentina from 1942, in Chile from 1961; his first name is given variously as Desiderio or Desiderius though in its original, Hungarian form it was almost certainly Dezső. His nonfiction speculative text, Zukunft und Ende der Welt: Ein Buch über die Geschicke von Menschheit und Erde (1932; trans Henry James Stenning as Creation's Doom 1934), assesses ...
Malraux, André
(1901-1976) French statesman, adventurer and author whose La Voie royale (1930; trans Stuart Gilbert as The Royal Way 1935) conveys a slightly peripheral Lost World atmosphere as its spiritually ambitious protagonist travel further and further into a heart of darkness in Cambodia and Laos, searching for a mysterious lost guru. [JC]
Wright, S Fowler
(1874-1965) UK author, employed as an accountant until middle-age. In 1917 he was a founder of the Empire Poetry League and edited until 1932 the League's journal Poetry, which serialized his translations of Dante Alighieri's Inferno and Purgatorio; he also edited many anthologies for the League's Merton Press, publishing some early work by Olaf Stapledon. Wright's first book was ...
Parsec
The official SI unit of astronomical distance; the name is a contraction of "parallax-second". The measure was introduced by UK astronomer Herbert Hall Towner (1861-1930). As the Earth travels from one side of the Sun to the other in half a year, parallax makes the position of any comparatively nearby star apparently shift. Using simple trigonometry, from the observed angular displacement of the star's measured position and knowledge of the distance between Earth and Sun the distance of the ...
Bonham, Frank
(1914-1988) US author, most of whose adult novels were Westerns, and who wrote in various modes for younger readers, though some of his sf or fantasy was for Young Adult readers. The Missing Persons League (1976), set in a starving Dystopian USA, presents its young protagonist with the chance to find a better world. The Forever Formula (1979) is a strong sf tale in which a ...
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 ...