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Friday 6 December 2024
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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Garland, Alex
(1970- ) UK screenwriter, Videogame writer, director and author, son of the political cartoonist Nicholas Garland (1935- ). His first works of interest were fiction, beginning with The Beach (1996), a tale inconclusively understandable as an exercise in implied Fantastika: its protagonists, having been given a map to an unknown Pacific Island, find ...
Hollow Earth
The concept of the Earth as a hollow, spherical shell with a habitable, internal concave surface accessible through polar openings or caves, or by mechanical bores, has long been a significant motif in sf. The idea's dual origins, from Religion and Pseudoscience, are still potent. Traditionally Hell was sited inside the Earth, a notion that persisted at least until the eighteenth century, when a theologian proposed that Earth's ...
Duff, Douglas V
(1901-1978) Argentinian-born author of UK parents, in the UK from 1906. His service in both World Wars (in 1916 as a naval cadet who had his ship sunk under him), and his inter-war career in the Palestine Police, mark him as a Young Adult writer with nothing to prove about his own manliness; it may (or may not) be consequential upon his personal experience of the world that his work is (almost uniquely in his generation of writers) free of racial or sexual ...
Ogawa Yōko
(1962- ) Japanese author, active from the late 1980s. Of her prolific output, the 1990 title story of The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (coll trans Stephen Snyder from various sources 2008) won the Shirley Jackson Award for 2008. She is of sf interest for Hisoyaka na kesshō (1994; trans Stephen Snyder as The Memory Police 2019), a somewhat abstract but intensely narrated Dystopian tale set in ...
McNeill, Graham
(?1971- ) Scottish designer of Games (see Game Design) and Toys and author of numerous Ties to various domains of the Warhammer Wargame universe. His contributions to Warhammer 40,000 comprise at least two subseries, Warhammer 40,000: The Ultramarines, beginning with ...
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 ...