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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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Hildebrandt, The Brothers

Working name for the team of American artists Gregory J Hildebrandt (1939-2024) and Timothy Mark Allen Hildebrandt (1939-2006), identical twin brothers, although they also worked separately using the working names Greg Hildebrandt and Tim Hildebrandt. They will forever be regarded primarily as the definitive illustrators of J R R Tolkien because of the famous Tolkien calendars that featured their paintings of his characters; oddly enough, except for one 1975 ...

Identity Exchange

The two-way version of Identity Transfer (which see). Although less plausible than one-way transfer in which the victim's personality is destroyed or suppressed, such identity swaps have a satisfying narrative neatness. The exchange of bodies and resulting forced education in another's viewpoint presents opportunities for Humour, exploited in such popular novels as F Anstey's ...

Whiting, Sydney

(1820/1821-1875) UK barrister, poet and author whose Memoirs of a Stomach: Written by Himself, That All Who Eat May Read (1853; rev 1853; further rev 1855) as by "The Minister of the Interior", though seemingly spoofish, articulates issues of the relationship between imperial mind and digestive body in mid-nineteenth-century terms. Of more sf interest is Heliondé; Or, Adventures in the Sun (1854; rev 1855), whose protagonist, conveniently ...

Transmutation

According to tradition (though many prefer a more mystical interpretation), the great goal of those proto-Scientists the alchemists was the transmutation of elements – specifically of base metals, usually lead, into gold, by means of the elusive Philosopher's Stone. Examples of gold-making facilitated by sf Inventions rather than the devices of fantasy include J B Harris-Burland's ...

Day, Oscar F G

(1860-1949) US journalist, song-writer and author of a Lost Race novel, The Devil's Gold: The Story of a Forgotten Race (1892), in which a vast statue of Satan cast in virgin gold is found under the mountains of Oregon; its discovery exposes an anti-Feminist pastoral society flourishing in a hidden valley, which is helped to survive through strict limits on population growth. [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 ...



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