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Saturday 1 April 2023
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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Thomas, D M
(1935-2023) UK poet and author who made use of sf themes most explicitly in such early Poetry as "The Head-Rape" in New Worlds for March 1968 and the two-part "Computer 70: Dreams & Lovepoems" (March-April 1970 New Worlds), a sequence assembled with other poetry of interest in Logan Stone (coll 1970); or the later "S. F." (in The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, anth ...
Lear, Peter
Pseudonym used by UK detective and thriller author Peter Lovesey (1936- ), brother of Andrew Lovesey, for Goldengirl (1977), a Near Future tale about a young athlete bred (there are hints of Cultural Engineering) to win gold medals in the 1980 Olympics; also for Spider Girl (1980), about a researcher into spiders who begins to identify ...
Anime
Loanword in Japanese, derived from "animation", thought to be in occasional use since the rise of locally-made feature cartoons in the late 1950s, but popularized through its appropriation by Osamu Tezuka on the production of the Television series Tetsuwan Atomu ["Mighty Atom"] (1963; vt Astro Boy). Tezuka used the truncated term to refer to a truncated product, ...
Colvin, Ian
(1912-1975) UK author and journalist whose sf novel is Domesday Village (1948), a Utopia set in a semi-agrarian Near-Future UK with a socialist regime. [JC]
Pedler, Kit
Working name of UK author and scientist Christopher Magnus Howard Pedler (1927-1981). He was a medical doctor, practising from 1953 for about three years, after which he began the research into the experimental pathology of eye disease that resulted in a second doctorate; from his early years he was a passionate advocate for the proper conservation of the planet. In collaboration with Gerry Davis he created the menacing Cybermen for the ...
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 ...