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Saturday 21 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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Ayrton, Elisabeth
(1910-1991) UK author, best known for books on cooking; married first to Nigel Balchin (1933-1951), then to Michael Ayrton (from 1952 until his death in 1975). Her sf novel, Day Eight (1978), portrays a Near-Future world in Ecological extremis, to which Gaia responds through a sudden acceleration in the ...
Roberts, John Maddox
(1947-2024) US author, prolific from the later 1980s to 2011, who also wrote nonfantastic novels as by Mark Ramsay. His first sf novel, The Strayed Sheep of Charun (1977; rev vt Cestus Dei 1983), is an action-packed romance set on a medievalized planet (see Medieval Futurism) in which Jesuits and others attempt to reform the violence which is the planet's (and novel's) raison d'être. There followed a variety of ...
Payne, Nick
(1984- ) UK screenwriter and playwright, most of whose dramas pithily compress sometimes transgressive content into stageable form, several of them applying speculative neuroscience to questions of Identity. In some of his work, worlds of discourse hover on the indeterminate boundaries of Fantastika, as in If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet (performed 22 October 2009 Bush Theatre, London; 2013 ...
Starfarers of Catan
Board Game (1999). Catan. Designed by Klaus Teuber. / Starfarers of Catan is a spinoff from Settlers of Catan (1995 Catan) designed by Klaus Teuber, which was the first product of the "German School" of Board Game design to achieve mass popularity outside continental Europe. German style games such as Settlers are characterized by an emphasis on ease of use and playability over simulational ...
Ellis, Dean
(1920-2009) US illustrator whose main interests lay outside the sf genre – he did much Illustration for advertising, for general magazines, and notably for postage stamps in the US and some other countries. He received his formal art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art – his studies interrupted by four years' active service in the Pacific – graduating in fine art, followed by postgraduate work at the Boston Museum School of Fine Art. He ...
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 ...