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Monday 16 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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Warren, Dean
(? - ) US engineer, in military service after World War Two and subsequently with Lockheed Missiles and Space, and author. The driving principle shaping most of his work seems to be the need for high Technology solutions to world problems such as Overpopulation and Climate Change, couched in stories, whose focus on individual Heroes typical of the Hard SF mode occasionally generates a sense of undue facility. His first novel, Man Over Mind: Control of the ...
Bell, Madison Smartt
(1957- ) US author, most of whose work has been nonfantastic. His second novel Waiting for the End of the World (1985) is, however, an exercise in intermittently postmodern Fantastika (see Postmodernism and SF); its protagonist, who speaks with the devil, plans to explode a nuclear weapon in New York, but instead of accomplishing this goal achieves a personal Transcendence through spontaneous combustion, successfully willing his body to explode. The protagonist of Behind ...
Penrose, Roger
(1931- ) UK mathematical physicist, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, who has achieved much significant work in his field. Occasional forays into recreational Mathematics include the creation, with his geneticist father Lionel Penrose (1898-1972), of the impossible ever-ascending or ever-descending Penrose staircase described in their paper "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion" (February 1958 The British Journal of ...
Weapons
In the catalogue of possible technological wonders offered in the New Atlantis (bound in with Sylva Sylvarum 1626; 1627 chap), Francis Bacon included more powerful cannon, better explosives and "wildfires burning in water, unquenchable". Such promises could not be left out if his prospectus were to appeal to the political establishment – his most important predecessor as a designer of hypothetical machines, Leonardo da Vinci, had likewise sought sponsorship on the basis of his ingenuity ...
MacGregor, Loren J
(1950- ) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Net (1987), a Galaxy-spanning sf adventure involving some unremarkable capers and a play-feud between two spacefaring merchant families. It is redeemed by the thought MacGregor gives to the implications of body-change Technology (the book reminded many readers of John Varley) and by his inventive use of the Net itself, which creates a sensory field as well as conveying information in space (see ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...