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Friday 14 February 2025
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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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Chesbro, George C
(1940-2008) US author who began to write detective stories in the late 1960s, sometimes as by David Cross, and who is of genre interest for the intermittent – but sometimes essential – sf elements in his Mongo sequence, about a dwarf former circus performer and professor of criminology (see Superheroes), whose real name is Robert Frederickson and who as Mongo the Magnificent runs a detective agency with his brother Garth, beginning with ...
Cook, Oscar
(1888-1952) UK editor and author, several of his tales of the fantastic being derived from several years in Borneo, "St Urag of the Tail" (July 1926 Weird Tales), an Apes as Human story climaxing in fatal devotions paid to a killer orchid; he is perhaps best known for the nonfiction Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts (1924). Of marginal sf interest is The Seventh Wave (1926), about a ...
Adams, Norman
(1933-2014) US illustrator, active from the early 1950s, often signing his work Adams, which has occasionally led to some confusion with the work of Tom Adams, as both specialized in trompe l'oeil effects, in both cases sometimes startlingly effective. Adams may be best known for his cover for the first edition of Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs; the image itself closely replicates his cover for an 1963 UK reprint, as ...
Eckert, Allan W
(1931-2011) US television writer – he is credited with over 200 scripts for the nonfiction animal series, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (1963-1988), for which he won an Emmy Award – and author, mainly of works of natural history, for which he has seven times been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and of fiction in various genres; his first novel, The Great Auk: A Novel (1963), containing no elements of the fantastic. He began writing work of genre ...
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, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...