SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 3 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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Downing, Paula E
Working name of US attorney, municipal judge and author Paula Elaine Downing King (1951-2017), who wrote also as Paula King and under the pseudonyms P K McAllister and Diana Marcellas; she was formerly married to and divorced from T Jackson King. Downing began publishing work of genre interest with "Loni's Promise" for Discoveries in 1989. Her first novel, Mad Roy's Light (1990) as Paula King, is an sf adventure featuring a human woman who ...
Bull, Reina M
(1924-2000) UK artist and book/magazine illustrator whose works were variously signed Sington (her birth surname), Reina, Janine, and RMB. Under the last byline she produced all of her sf work, which comprised four memorable covers in 1951 and 1952, two apiece for Science Fantasy and New Worlds; aside from being stylistically very different from the standard fare of the time, these covers carried a sexual charge that ...
Repton, Humphry
(1752-1818) UK landscape gardener, of great significance as theorist and practitioner, his successful gardens expressing an early Romantic sense of the picturesque, in contrast to the domineering formalism of earlier styles. He is of sf interest for one short story, "From a Private Mad-House" (in Variety: A Collection of Essays: Written in the Year 1787, anth 1788), which was republished as "Voyage to the Moon" (in Odd Whims; And Miscellanies, coll 1804 2vols), in ...
Allaby, Michael
(1933- ) UK author, mostly of nonfiction texts in fields like Ecology; but his The Greening of Mars (1984) with James Lovelock (of Gaia Hypothesis fame), though basically a nonfiction study of how Mars might be settled, is told as a fictionalized narrative whose tone is upliftingly Utopian. [JC]
Harrison, Niall
(1980- ) UK medical writer, editor and author, active from around 2003, both in Fandom and as a reviewer and critic. He served as Features Editor of Vector (2006-2011), and more demandingly for Strange Horizons as Reviews Editor (2006-2010) and as Editor-in-Chief (2011-2017). A large selection from the critical and review work he published during this period has been assembled as ...
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 ...