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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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Shelley, Percy Bysshe
(1792-1822) UK playwright, poet and author whose importance to the development of science fiction (see Proto SF) in the early nineteenth century is tangential to the main drift of his work as a poet; he was, along with Lord Byron and John Keats (1795-1821), one of the central figures of the second wave of British Romantic poetry. It is an aetherialized version of this whitewashed figure whose ...
Magnetism
While Gravity was long understood as a force that attracted people to the ground, it was accepted as a logical consequence of Earth's position at the center of the universe – as explained by Aristotle; but when it was discovered in ancient times that lodestones – naturally occurring magnets – could attract pieces of iron, the phenomenon seemed more mysterious and suggested the possibility of other strange attractive or repellent forces. Thus, ...
Swain, John D
(? -? ) Prolific US Pulp author active 1901-1939, chiefly with short crime/thriller tales; he began to publish work of genre interest with "L'Enfant Terrible" in The Cavalier for 4 May 1912. His "The Last Man on Earth" (November 1923 Munsey's Magazine) – in which the Last Man is the last adult male in a world of women ...
Zornado, J
(1964- ) US academic and author whose Future History sequence, beginning with 2050 Volume One: Gods of Little Earth (2007; rev vt 2050: A Future History, Volume 1: Gods of Little Earth 2011), is set partly in the very Near Future and two millennia later, in what has become a virtual Ruined Earth as a consequence of a piling up of ...
Frost, Jason
A Zebra Books House Name, used almost exclusively by US author Raymond Obstfeld for the Warlord sequence of Post-Holocaust sf adventures typical in theme and style of most Survivalist Fiction of the 1980s: The Warlord (1983), The Warlord #2: The Cutthroat (1984), The Warlord #3: Badland (1984), ...
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 ...