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Wednesday 22 March 2023
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.
Site updated on 22 March 2023
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Zentner, Alexi
(1973- ) Canadian author, now in USA, active since around 2007; he also writes as by Ezekiel Boone. His first novel, Touch (short version 2007 Tin House; 2011), is a fantasy set mostly in the Canadian north, in a small town where continued logging activities may be arousing chthonic wrath (see Gaia); The Lobster Kings (2014) re-enacts William Shakespeare's King Lear ...
Sommerfeld, Adolf
(1870-1943) German journalist and author of a Future War novel, Frankreichs Ende im Jahre 19?? (1912; rev 1914; trans Louis G Redmont as How Germany Crushed France: (The Story of the Greatest Conspiracy in History) 1915), in which Germany, trusting safely in the neutrality of Britain and Russia, utterly defeats France in a very Near Future 1915. / Sommerfeld should ...
West, Nathanael
Pseudonym of US screenwriter and author Nathan Weinstein (1903-1940), perhaps best known for the non-fantastic Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), active from the early 1920s. He adapted his mother's maiden name on at least one occasion to sign himself Nathan von Wallenstein Weinsten (he added the "von"), but his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931 chap), was signed Nathanael West, as was everything he wrote from this point. Balso Snell, much indebted to ...
Robinson, Philip Bedford
(1926-1986) UK author who worked in India 1950-1958. The deracinated protagonist of Masque of a Savage Mandarin (1969; vt Masque of a Savage Mandarin: A Comedy of Horrors 1974) takes symbolic revenge upon the world via the systematic destruction – by electromagnetic Rays resembling microwave radiation – of a hapless, innocent neighbour's brain (see Horror in SF). In the 1970s, Robinson wrote ...
Saunders, Jake
(1947- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Bidderfrost Dragon" for Coven in March 1970, but as a writer has been one of the less active members of a Texas grouping which included Howard Waldrop, his collaborator on the Near Future The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 (July-August 1973 Galaxy as "A Voice and Bitter Weeping"; much exp ...
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. ...