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Saturday 12 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Repp, Ed Earl
(1901-1979) US advertising man, newspaper reporter and author; he wrote a large number of fairly unremarkable Pulp-magazine adventures for about a decade from 1929, ceasing to produce sf during World War Two, after his work as a screenwriter began to pick up; between 1934 and 1957 he wrote about fifty scripts, all Westerns. Some of his short fiction appeared as by Bradnor Buckner. His first sf story – "Beyond Gravity" for ...
Wilkins, Lura M
(1879-1963) US author whose awkwardly mixed-genre "Over There": Chronicles of an English Engineer "Gone West" (1935) is presented as its author's stenographic recording of reminiscences of the horrors of World War One on the part of a British engineer. His narrative also describes his discovery of an Underground Utopia, whose entrance is on the dark side of the ...
Flint, Eric
(1947-2022) US author, who spent many years before beginning his writing career as a longshoreman and then machinist, as well as serving as a labour organizer and member of the Socialist Workers Party (whose origins date back to the prime years of the Wobblies in 1920s America). His first work of genre interest was "Entropy, and the Strangler" (in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume IX, anth 1993, ed Dave Wolverton), though he ...
Discworld [series]
Bestselling comic Fantasy Series which is central to the popularity of Terry Pratchett (see his entry for further discussion). The Discworld setting is a flat world (see Flat Earth) supported by four elephants standing atop a giant spacegoing turtle, this whole ensemble complicatedly orbited by the local sun and moon. Beginning with broad ...
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 ...