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Friday 2 June 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.
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Rejuvenation
The restoration of youth or a plausible semblance thereof has always seemed both more practical and more comfortable than the troublingly open-ended perspectives of Immortality. This entry deals chiefly with stories of bodily rejuvenation through Medicine and allied procedures: for the wilder sf tropes of transferring one's mind or brain to a new, young body or of growing inexorably younger by living backwards, see ...
Picacio, John
(1969- ) US illustrator who graduated in 1992 from the University of Texas at Austin and practised as an architect for some years until, in 2001, becoming a full-time artist; since then he has published at least one book cover a month on average, producing also interior illustrations and others. His first book commission was for the 1996 30th-anniversary edition of Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man (September 1966 ...
Walkey, S
(1871-1953) UK author, active contributor of boy's stories to various journals from the early 1890s, with an emphasis on pirate tales, with hints of the supernatural that are normally rationalized; the Scarlet Pimpernel-like figure featured in the Jack-a-Lantern sequence is not the superman he seems (see Baroness Orczy). Walkey is of sf interest for In Quest of Sheba's Treasure: A Perilous Adventure by Land and Sea (28 August 1895-?? 1896 ...
Baines, Elizabeth
Pseudonym of UK author, playwright and sometime teacher, actor, editor and publisher Helen White (1947- ). Her first novel The Birth Machine (1983; text restored 1996) is dark semi-surrealist sf with ingredients of Feminism, built around an initially conforming citizen stirred to rebel. Baines states that inappropriate editing on its first appearance led her to self-publish a second edition as an "author's cut". The novel ...
Hodgart, Matthew
(1916-1996) UK academic, Professor of English at Sussex University from 1964. His continuation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735), A New Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms [for subtitle see Checklist] (1969 chap), is a Satire on the 1960s upheavals in higher education in the UK. [JC] see also: Gulliver. /
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. ...