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Tuesday 28 June 2022
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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Moore, M Louise
(? -? ) US author who, with M Beauchamp, self-published anonymously a Hollow Earth tale, Al-Modad; Or, Life Scenes Beyond the Polar Circumflex: A Religio-Scientific Solution of Problems of Present and Future Life, by an Untrammeled Free-Thinker (1892), in which Al-Modad and a companion arrive in a subterranean Lost World under the Arctic, which they find to be a Utopia governed on socialist principles. In the absence of Christian strictures, nudity is ...
Spaceships
The suggestion that people might one day travel to the Moon inside a flying machine was first put forward seriously by John Wilkins in 1638. There had been cosmic voyages prior to that date, and there were to be many more thereafter (see Fantastic Voyages; Space Flight), but few took the mechanics of the journey seriously enough to invest much imaginative effort in the design of credible vehicles. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (June 1835 Southern Literary ...
Apparitions
UK tv series (2008). BBC, Lime Pictures. Directed by Joe Ahearne. Written by Joe Ahearne. Cast includes Luigi Diberti, Siobhan Finneran, Elyes Gabel, David Gyasi, Martin Shaw, John Shrapnel and Rick Warden. Six 60-minute episodes. Colour. / Father Jacob Myers (Shaw) is a London-based priest tasked with investigating the "causes of saints", a Catholic detective responsible for assessing the veracity of miracles. He has been targeted by the forces of evil (see Gods and Demons) for his nascent ...
Barnes, Arthur K
(1909-1969) US pulp author, known also for his works outside the sf field, who was intermittently active in sf until about 1946, beginning with "Lord of the Lightning" for Wonder Stories in December 1931. His Gerry Carlyle series of Space Opera tales – in which Miss Carlyle and a sidekick hunt down various Aliens, carefully designated as non-sentient, for the London Interplanetary Zoo – was worked up into Interplanetary Hunter (stories June 1937-Winter 1946 Thrilling Wonder; fixup ...
Morris, Jan
(1926-2020) UK travel writer and historian, from just after World War Two until the mid-1970s as James Morris; A Venetian Bestiary (1982) is fantasticated within its conventional frame, but she is of genuine sf interest for Last Letters from Hav (1985; exp vt as coll, Hav 2006). In the 1985 iteration, a travel writer named Morris sojourns in the vastly intricate Middle Eastern peninsula and City called Hav, a Zone safely insulated behind a great escarpment or Polder [see The Encyclopedia of ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...