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Thursday 17 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 14 April 2025
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Balchin, Nigel
(1908-1970) UK author, industrialist and wartime scientific adviser to the Army Council; married (1933-1951) to Elisabeth Ayrton. From the beginning of World War Two his fictions specialized in the creation of psychologically and physically crippled "competent men", as in The Small Back Room (1943), and were plotted around scientific problems at the verge of sf; A Sort of Traitors (1949), in particular, nears new territory as its ...
Lanza, Clara
(1859-1939) US author, a marquise by marriage into the Italian nobility in 1878, whose Mr Perkins' Daughter (1881) flirts with Amnesia on the skirts of the fantastic; her sf novel, Scarabaeus: The Story of an African Beetle (1892) with James Clarence Harvey (1865-1945), features a camera capable of photographing the past (see Time Viewer), a scene in which retinal images identify a murderer (a commonplace of ...
Costello, P F
One of the many Ziff-Davis House Names, this appeared on over 40 magazine stories 1941-1958, but until the late 1940s was used exclusively for stories by William P McGivern – indeed it was his personal pen-name until he was called up. It was then sometimes used by Chester S Geier, later by Roger P Graham (Rog Phillips) ...
Binet, Laurent
(1972- ) French teacher and author whose earlier work tends to employ metafictional devices, interweaving "nonfictional" modes of historical apprehension and surreal narrative techniques (see Absurdist SF; Fabulation). His first work of interest, Forces et faiblesses de nos muqueuses ["Strengths and Weaknesses of Our Mucus Membranes"] (2000), is an estranged and modestly fictionalized ...
Cybernetics Guardian
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (1989; original title Seijūki Saigādo). AIC. Directed by Koichi Ohata. Written by Riku Sanjo. Voice cast includes Takeshi Kusao, Hirotaka Suzuoki and Hiromi Tsuru. 43 minutes. Colour. / In 2019 Adler (Suzuoki) fondly regards the City of Cyber-Wood: "a forest of steel, a gigantic concrete life form with Technology its blood"; laments that it suffers from a "malignancy", ...
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 ...