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Tuesday 10 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.
Site updated on 9 December 2024
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Slauerhoff, Jan
(1898-1936) Dutch poet and author, who spent much of his adult life as a ship's doctor in exotic climes, and whose two published novels treat China as a symbolic and fantastical creation. Het verboden rijk (November 1931-September 1932 Forum; 1932; trans Paul Vincent as The Forbidden Kingdom, 2012) haunts a contemporary Irish wanderer with the memories and experience of the Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes (1524-1580), retracing Camoes' journey in China with a ...
Mead, Shepherd
Working name of US author Edward Mead (1914-1994), in either Switzerland or the UK after 1957; he worked in advertising before turning to writing, and was active in various genres. Satire and comedy combine in most of his works, most pointedly in his best-known work, the nonfantastic mock instructional manual, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1952), for the staged version of which he shared a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony. Satire also ...
Beckler, David
(1960- ) Ethiopian firefighter, entrepreneur and author, in UK from 1984, who is of sf interest for his Antonia Conti series of thrillers beginning with A Long Shadow (2022), set in a Dystopian Near Future London, where lives are constantly monitored by privatized surveillance networks; the journalist protagonist, investigating the growing number of cases of ...
Kievnauchfilm
Ukrainian film studio founded in 1943 which initially produced science documentaries (the name is a contraction of Kiev Science Films), but in 1959 Irina Gurvich, Ippolit Lazarchuk and Nina Vasilenko opened an animation workshop that, until its closure in 1998, made over 300 films, mainly shorts, usually for television. Ukrainian animation had began in 1927 with Vyacheslav Levandovskiy's The Chaff Goby (original title Solomennyi Biychok), but was ...
Vonarburg, Élisabeth
(1947- ) French-born Canadian teacher, editor, critic and author, in Quebec from 1973, naturalized 1976. She was fiction editor 1979-1990 and editor 1983-1985 of Solaris; and began publishing sf with "Marée haute" for Requiem in 1978; the tale appeared as "High Tide" in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (anth 1979) edited by Maxim Jakubowski. Many of her stories (some ...
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 ...