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Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
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Burdekin, Katharine
(1896-1963) UK author, who was working in a military hospital during World War One when her husband was wounded in action; she signed some of her work Kay Burdekin in America and, in the 1930s, wrote what remains her best-known novel as by Murray Constantine, a pseudonym which was confirmed only in 1985 by Professor Daphne Patai. Neither of her first two novels explores the fantastic. Her third, The Burning Ring (1927), however, is a ...
Blaine, Mahlon
(1894-1969) US illustrator, probably born Blain and adding the "e" later. He was a major figure in book Illustration before the Depression, which devastated his livelihood: although he continued to illustrate, much of his work was for non-mainstream publishers; towards the end of his life he returned to illustrate some Edgar Rice Burroughs reissues [see Checklist below]. Among books of genre interest that he illustrated ...
Jane, Fred T
(1865-1916) UK editor, illustrator and author, best known for founding the Jane's Fighting Ships series (as Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships from 1898; as Jane's Fighting Ships from 1905). Blake of the "Rattlesnake", or The Man Who Saved England: A Story of Torpedo Warfare in 189– (1895) is a Future War story in which, through a series of engagements, modern torpedoes save the UK from the Russians and ...
Lucas, George
(1944- ) US film-maker. He attended the University of Southern California Film School and as a graduate student made an sf short there entitled THX 1138:4EB (1967), which won film festival awards. Working in 1968 as an assistant to Francis Ford Coppola he made a highly praised documentary about the filming of Coppola's The Rain People (1969); then in 1969, with Coppola as executive producer, Lucas began a feature-film version, ...
Folingsby, Kenneth
The possible pseudonym of a probable Scotsman (? - ) whose Meda: A Tale of the Future (1891) – though the events it recounts turn out to be a dream experienced during a four-month trance – remains of some sf interest for the imaginative scope of the 5575 CE Utopia depicted, in which large-headed brainy "Scotonians" are fed by ambient electricity, possess Antigravity, and ...
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 ...