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Friday 20 September 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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Engel, Leonard
(1916-1964) US journalist and author, with Emanuel S Piller, of one of the very first Cold War Future War novels, World Aflame: The Russian-American War of 1950 (1947), in which the USA's control of the air – and use of that preponderance in a nuclear first strike – proves insufficient to crush Russia, nor does a subsequent use of Poison gas ...
Black, Frank Burne
(? -? ) Canadian author of The Chronicle of Kan-Uk the Kute [for subtitle see checklist below] (1918), a Satirical description of World War One, couched in quasi-Biblical cadences. The distortions in the spelling of names and places, and the explicit provenance given in the subtitle, make it clear that Kan-Uk has written down his tale at some point in the ...
Newcomb, Simon
(1835-1909) Canadian-born author, in the USA from 1853, of texts on and studies in Astronomy and Mathematics. In his Edisonade, His Wisdom, the Defender: A Story (1900), future historians tell how a professor discovers a limitless Power Source in 1941, is responsible for the Invention of an ...
Brain in a Box
The disembodied brain in a box (or in a jar, a vat, or some more elaborate laboratory apparatus) is a recurring trope, most frequently in the Horror in SF context. Well-known instances are H P Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness" (August 1931 Weird Tales); E E Smith's's Galactic Patrol (September 1937-February 1938 Astounding; ...
Tardivel, Jules-Paul
(1851-1905) US-born journalist and author, in Canada from about 1868, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1896; in Montreal he founded a newspaper, La Vérité, espousing Quebec nationalism, and published in it his separatist Utopia, Pour la patrie: roman du xxe siècle (1895 La Vérité; 1895; trans Sheila Fischman as ...
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 ...