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Friday 8 November 2024
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Hildebrandt, The Brothers
Working name for the team of American artists Gregory J Hildebrandt (1939-2024) and Timothy Mark Allen Hildebrandt (1939-2006), identical twin brothers, although they also worked separately using the working names Greg Hildebrandt and Tim Hildebrandt. They will forever be regarded primarily as the definitive illustrators of J R R Tolkien because of the famous Tolkien calendars that featured their paintings of his characters; oddly enough, except for one 1975 ...
Free, Colin
(1925-1996) Australian author whose The Soft Kill (1973), set in a totalitarian Near Future world in the depths of an Overpopulation crisis (an emphasis which clearly dates Free's concerns, as later in the twentieth century overpopulation became an issue more often ignored than confronted); the privileged few live in elevated Keeps. [JC]
Southon, Arthur E
(1887-1964) UK minister and author, much of his fiction being adventure tales set in Africa. They include A Yellow Napoleon: A Romance of West Africa (1923), which describes an attempted insurrection in the immediate Near Future; and Jackson's Ju-Ju (1927; vt The God of Gold: A Tale of the West African Coast 1927), a Lost Race novel. [JC]
Carr, Wallace
Pseudonym of UK author Reginald Aubrey Gibbin (1890-1973), mostly of romances for teenage girls, active from around 1930; he is of some sf interest for The Grotto of Arratsu (1940), whose two young protagonists discover a Lost Race on an unknown Island in the Atlantic Ocean, where great gates in the eponymous Underground grotto once opened the way to Atlantis ...
Gibson, Gary
(1965- ) Scots author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mother Love" for Skeleton Crew in March 1991, and whose first novel, Angel Stations (2004), neatly follows the pattern of the "new Space Opera", the kind of baroquely expansive tale which exfoliated in the late twentieth century and whose most comprehensive example may be Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos (omni ...
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 ...