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Friday 7 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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Fyne, Neal
A probable pseudonym of an unidentified UK author (? -? ) known only for a Lost World tale, The Land of the Living Dead: A Narrative of the Perilous Sojourn There of George Cowper, Mariner, in the Year 1835 (1897), set on an uncharted Island ruled by a tyrant – the Mighty Justin – who controls his subjects by possession of the antidote to the ...
de Mille, William C
(1878-1955) US playwright, film director and screenwriter, older brother of Cecil B DeMille (1881-1959). (Note that although Cecil compressed his name to DeMille, William did not.) He wrote two plays of sf interest: "Food": A Tragedy of the Future in One Act (performed 1912 as Fifty Years from Now; 1914 chap) with Margaret Scott Oliver, a Satire in which food has become so expensive that a marriage may founder on the husband's jealous destruction ...
Webster, Henry Kitchell
(1875-1932) US author in whose sf novel, The Sky-Man (1910), a young soldier and inventor, having built a winged lighter-than-air single-person Airship, is flying it in the Arctic where he encounters a young woman searching for her missing father, who has indicated via a message in a bottle that he has discovered a clement Lost World. He saves her from rape, and the tale ends happily. [JC]
Davidson, Michael
Pseudonym of Michael Zeik (? - ), US author of two sf novels: The Karma Machine (1975), a dystopian vision of a Computer-dominated world; and Daughter of Is: A Science Fiction Epic: An "Else-when" Parable (1978), an Alternate-History tale. Davidson should not be confused with the poet Michael Davidson (1944- ). [JC]
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 ...