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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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Brant, John Ira
(1872-1959) US inventor and author whose The New Regime: A. D. 2202 (1909) bases its vision of an international Utopia on the work of Edward Bellamy. Unusually, the "visitor" to this utopia is not a Sleeper Awakes figure but a contemporary man who has given himself Amnesia through Drug use, and must be reintroduced to his happy ...
Slater, Henry J
(1879-1963) UK author whose work showed the influence of H G Wells in both Ship of Destiny (1951), where Post-Holocaust survivors sail across a drowned Europe, and The Smashed World (1952), set 3000 years hence in a World State which is destroyed by a reborn Napoleon. Some of Slater's effects oddly prefigure the afterlife fantasies of Philip José Farmer. ...
Comp, T Allan
(1942- ) US historian and anthologist, in the latter capacity editor of the useful compilation The Man in the Moone and Other Lunar Fantasies (anth 1971; vt The Man in the Moone: An Anthology of Antique Science Fiction and Fantasy 1971) with Faith K Pizor [who see for further details]. Comp's own activities and frequent nonfiction publications have focused on Ecological issues, with ...
Suspended Animation
The notion of suspended animation is one of the oldest literary devices in sf, by virtue of its convenience as a means of Time Travel into the future (see also Sleeper Awakes). It is used in Utopian romances like L S Mercier's Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (trans 1772), Mary Griffith's ...
Bowers, A Herbert
(? -? ) US author of an sf novel, With Gyves of Gold: A Novel (1898) with Henry Athey, both writers remaining untraced, though both may have been based in Missouri; for details of this sf novel, see Athey. [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 ...