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Monday 27 June 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.
Site updated on 27 June 2022
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Bass, T J
Working name of US author Thomas J Bassler (1932-2011), who began publishing sf with "Star Seeder" for If in September 1969. He was almost exclusively associated with the Hive series that comprises his only book publications, Half Past Human (December 1969 Galaxy and November 1970 If; fixup 1971) and The Godwhale (1974), itself expanded from an earlier story, "Rorqual Maru" (January 1972 Galaxy). Through a network of intricately interlinked stories, the first novel depicts a densely overcrowded ...
Ahmed, Samira
(? - ) Indian-born author in US from childhood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Brains Don't Smell" in Entropy Mag for 2016. She is of sf interest for her second novel, the Young-Adult Interment (2019), set in an American very Near Future difficult to distinguish from the tale's year of publication. Young men and women identified as ethnically unsound through surveys are imprisoned in interment camps, their fate not easily to be ...
Liddle, Carl
(1897-1968) US journalist and author of Tunchi (1933) with David Thibault, an unusually well-researched Lost Race tale set in South America and attempting to present the possible characteristics of an ancient Amerindian civilization. [JC]
Crime and Punishment
Genre fiction concerned with crime may be roughly divided into detections and thrillers. The former are problem stories; the latter exploit the melodramatic potential of the conflicts inherent in criminal deviation. For further discussion of the many forms of punishment found in sf, see the entries for Prisons and Torture. / Detective stories depend very heavily on ingenuity and generally require very fine distinctions between what is possible and what is not. It is not easy to combine sf ...
BEM
A once common item of sf Terminology, being an acronym of Bug-Eyed Monster and referring to the type of Alien creature, usually menacing, which was regularly pictured on the covers of SF Magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. [PN] see also: Monsters. /
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 ...