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Monday 17 February 2025
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.
Site updated on 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Unusual Tales
US Comic (1955-1965). 49 issues. Charlton Comics. Artists include Vince Alascia, Steve Ditko, Dick Giordano, Rocco "Rocke" Mastroserio, Bill Molno and Charles Nicholas. Most of the scripts were by the prolific Joe Gill. 36 pages, except for one double-length issue. Usually 4-5 strips per issue, plus a two-page text story and often one, sometimes two, 1-2 page fiction or ...
Dyroff, Charlee
(? - ) US author whose first novel, Loneliness & Company (2024), is set in the Near Future Dystopian shambles of New York; the alert young protagonist becomes involved in Cultural Engineering project in which an AI is learning how to keep humans from feeling lonely. The answer seems ...
Pudney, John
(1909-1977) UK editor, poet, journalist and author, initially best known as a poet, beginning with his first book, Spring Encounter (coll 1933 chap); his most famous single poem is "For Johnny" (1941 News Chronicle), a ballad-like ode on the deaths of airmen published after the Battle of Britain (see World War Two). Some of the tales assembled in It Breathed Down my Neck: A Selection of Stories (coll 1946) are supernatural. ...
Dulac, Odette
Pseudonym of French opera singer, songwriter, sculptor and author Jeanne Latrilhe (1865-1939); in the first capacity, she starred most frequently in French operettas, as well as maintaining a cabaret career, until 1904. Active as an author of fiction and nonfiction from before World War One, she published one tale of sf interest, Tel qui l'est! (1926; trans Brian Stableford as The War of the Sexes 2015), in which explorations ...
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 ...