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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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Mailer, Norman
(1923-2007) US public figure, controversialist and author at the centre of American intellectual life for many decades after the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), though his influence waned in his last years. Mailer's work was never identified with genre fiction, but all of his later fiction contain elements of Fantasy, with frequent evocations of an imaginative world containing spirits, paranormal phenomena and magical ...
Cross, Victoria
Pseudonym of India-born UK author Annie Sophie Cory (1868-1952) – also known as Vivian Cross; she was the sister of Adela Florence Nicolson (1875-1904) who wrote as Laurence Hope; early in her career, she was briefly notorious for The Woman Who Didn't (1895), written in response to Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did (1895). Her only known sf is Martha Brown, M.P.: A Girl of To-morrow (1935), which depicts relationships ...
Squid Girl
Japanese animated tv series (2010-2014). Original title Shinryaku! Ika Musume. Based on the Manga by Masahiro Anbe. Diomedéa. Written by Michiko Yokote. Directed by Tsutomu Mizushima and Yasutaka Yamamoto. Voice cast includes Ayumi Fujimura, Hisako Kanemoto, Hitomi Nabatame, Miki Ōtani and Rie Tanaka. 24 24-minute episodes and five OVAs. Colour. / The routine of a beachfront cafe, the Lemon Beach House, is ...
Clark, Thomas March
(1812-1903) US cleric (he was the fifth Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island) and author of the Young Adult tale, John Whopper, the Newsboy (July-October 1870 Old and New; 1871) as Anonymous, in which the eponymous newspaper delivery boy falls through a hole into the Hollow Earth eventually reaching China. En route he visits the North Pole. [JC]
Gilbert, Stephen
(1912-2010) Irish businessman, journalist and author whose first novel, The Landslide (1943), is of sf interest, being a Parallel-World fantasy of some complexity in which primeval eggs, exposed by the titular event, begin to hatch into dragons; his second sf novel, Monkeyface (1948), movingly explores the familiar territory of the self-aware ape (see Apes as Human); his third, ...
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 ...