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Tuesday 15 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 ...
Horner, Donald W
(1874-1944) UK astronomer, meteorologist and author who specialized in popular-science texts. Though published as boys' fiction, By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends (1910) offers a numerate and complex vision of a high-tech Near Future, featuring picturephones, television and electric cars, and describing the protagonists' usual tour of the Solar System with prescient realism, though the inhabitants of ...
Kosmicheskiy Reys: Fantasticheskaya Novella
Russian film (1935; vt The Cosmic Journey). Mosfilm. Directed by Vasili Zhuravlev. Written by Aleksandr Filimonov, based on the novel Vne zemli (1920; trans as Beyond the Planet Earth 1960) by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Cast includes Vassili Gaponenko, Sergei Komarov and K Moskalenko. 70 minutes. Black and white. / After their equipment is tested by experimentally sending a ...
Wirkus, Tim
(? - ) US author, with a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of South California, whose Mormon upbringing plays a significant part in their work to date. Wirkus's first novel, City of Brick and Shadow (2014), while non-fantastical, draws on the influence of Jorge Luis Borges for a mystery, never resolved, about two hapless, young Mormon missionaries in Brazil who are drawn into a ...
Coward, Noël
(1899-1973) UK actor, poet, composer, playwright and author, who performed professionally on the stage from 1911 and in films from 1917; after some apprentice work beginning in 1917, his first successfully produced play I'll Leave It To You (performed 1920; 1920 chap) was followed by dozens of successful comedic satires over the next decades. He did not often engage in the fantastic as a dramatist (and never as a fiction writer), though his anti-war play, ...
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 ...