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Friday 20 May 2022
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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Ebook
An electronic book, normally written as in this encyclopedia as ebook (but as Ebook when linking to this entry). The term is generally used to describe both the hardware – typically a device about the size of a small paper book, with a screen for reading and controls; in appearance similar to a sophisticated cell phone – and any text which has been downloaded into the device. The only slowly increasing popularity of the ebook has been governed by various difficulties which are ...
Norden, Eric
Pseudonym of US author Eric Pelletier (1899-1979), who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Primal Solution" in Cavalier for January 1968, in which a Jewish scientist develops mental Time Travel, inhabits the mind of Hitler and tries to get him to commit suicide – unsuccessfully, creating instead within Hitler his hatred for Jews. Norden assembled his short work in Starsongs and Unicorns: Journeys Through Time and Space (coll 1978). His novel, The Ultimate Solution (1973), ...
Kurtz, Katherine
(1944- ) US author employed in various fields including oceanography and cancer research, as well as a stint as instructional designer for the Los Angeles Police Department. Her fiction, basically Fantasy, though with a sensation of underlying premises arguable in sf terms, has been dominated from the beginning by the unfolding Chronicles of the Deryni sequences, all set in a highly detailed, coherent Parallel World whose society is hierarchical and in many of its aspects ...
Tsutsui Yasutaka
(1934- ) Multiple-award winning author, sometime actor and scenarist, whose works of Absurdist SF and commentary on the Media Landscape made him one of the Big Three of Japanese sf in the twentieth century, alongside Shinichi Hoshi and Sakyō Komatsu. He is best understood first as Japan's answer to the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s, and such social satirists as Robert Sheckley, Norman Spinrad and Kurt Vonnegut Jr; his later works form the basis of Japan's sf ...
Xenobot
An example of speculative Terminology, the term taken from Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog; used initially to describe tiny self-healing Robots bred organically from (as an instance) frog stem cells, but used more widely in the third decade of the twenty-first century to describe any robot bred organically. In this encyclopedia, the term Android is usefully restricted to humanoid-shaped artificial beings. Androids are therefore xenobots, but the reverse is not true: xenobots need not be ...
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 ...