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Friday 29 September 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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Bloom, Britton
(1951- ) Author, presumably US, of a Buck Rogers Tie: Buck Rogers – The Inner Planets Trilogy, Vol 3: Matrix Cubed (1991). [JC] see also: Buck Rogers XXVC. /
Williams, Emlyn
(1905-1987) Welsh actor, playwright and author, his first plays being performed as early as 1922; several of them have mild inclinations to the supernatural. Headlong (1980), which was filmed as King Ralph (1991) directed by David S Ward, is an Alternate History tale in which an American, Ralph Jones, suddenly succeeds to the British throne after the entire royal family has died in an accident. The story diverges significantly ...
Uplift
This term, both noun and verb, has entered the sf vocabulary, partly it may be to dodge the implications of, or simply to overleap, the kind of applied Eugenics that marks, for instance, the Arisians' breeding of an Aryan super race to rule the galaxies in E E Smith's Lensman series. Perhaps less toxically, a Secret Master race of advanced humans enacts ...
Void Science Fiction and Fantasy
Australian Digest-size, saddle-stapled Semiprozine, five issues 1975-1977, thereafter continuing until 1981 as a series, four books, three numbers per book, which effectively constituted an original-anthology series; published by Void Publications, Melbourne; edited by Paul Collins. At a time when Australian sf had few local outlets, Void was a brave venture, though in appearance it could be ...
Downing, Charles
(? -? ) US author in whose Near Future tale, The Reckoning (1927), the Japanese Invasion by air of California (see Yellow Peril) causes the destruction of Los Angeles. Full-scale War then begins. [JC]
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 ...