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Friday 27 May 2022
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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Tweed, Thomas F
(1890-1940) UK soldier, publisher and author, political advisor to David Lloyd George (1863-1945) from 1927 until his death; this relationship, and his affair with Lloyd George's then mistress (and eventual wife) Frances Stevenson (1888-1972) both figure, transposed to America, in his first sf novel, the Near-Future Rinehard: A Melodrama of the Nineteen-Thirties (1933; vt Gabriel Over the White House: A Novel of the Presidency 1933), filmed as Gabriel Over the White House (1933). The ...
Rand, Ayn
(1905-1982) Russian-born US screenwriter, critic and author, born Alyssa Zinovievna Rozenbaum, using that name for early work like her first book, Gollivud: amerikanskiĭ kino-gorod ["Hollywood: The American Cinema City"] (1926 chap), a moderately ecstatic study of American film and the architecture of the skyscraper as sharing a future-thrusting sublimity. Her third novel, The Fountainhead (1943), which is nonfantastic, can be seen as this vision translated into fiction. / Rozenbaum ...
Verner, Gerald
Best-known pseudonym of UK author John Robert Stuart Pringle (1897-1980), who also wrote as by Donald Stuart, under which name he wrote forty-four Sexton Blake tales beginning in 1927, and as by Thane Leslie; along with these primary pseudonyms, he apparently also wrote as by Derwent Steele and Nigel Vane. The Vampire Men (1941) is a Vampire thriller. Most of Verner's work consisted of crime thrillers, though some fantastic content is discernible in some titles, including the occasional ...
Lurgan, Lester
Initial pseudonym of UK author and church worker Mabel Winifred Knowles (1875-1949), who was far more prolific under her later pseudonym May Wynne, which she used for something like 200 historical romances and girl's books between World War One and her death. As Lurgan, she wrote several thrillers between 1910 and 1913, and A Message from Mars: A Story Founded on the Popular Play by Richard Ganthony (1912), which novelized Richard Ganthony's extremely popular play from 1899; the play was also ...
J Lloyd Eaton Collection
In 1969 the late Donald Wilson, University Librarian at the University of California, Riverside Library (now the Tomás Rivera Library), purchased a Collection of 7500 volumes of sf and fantasy from the estate of J Lloyd Eaton MD. Eaton had for several decades collected many rare and unusual monographs of sf, including such items as Varney the Vampire (1847) and Frank Aubrey's King of the Dead (1903), ceasing his active interest in the field about 1956. For the first decade after its ...
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 ...