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Monday 9 December 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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Verne, Jules
(1828-1905) French playwright and author, one of the two pre-eminent nineteenth-century figures in what was not yet called sf – the other being H G Wells – though neither claimed a dominant status for himself or for the other in the popular literature of the time, nor did either of them claim to be fathering a new genre. The importance of Wells's early Scientific Romances was soon recognized, and it has never ...
Knight, Norman L
(1895-1972) US author and pesticide chemist for the Department of Agriculture until his retirement in 1963. He was not a prolific writer, publishing only 11 stories altogether, the first of which was the serialized novella "Frontier of the Unknown" for Astounding in July and August 1937. He made his main contribution by collaborating with James Blish on A Torrent of Faces (1967). This novel – whose ...
Aaron, Shale
Pseudonym of US teacher and author Robert Boswell (1953- ), whose work under his own name is not of genre interest. Virtual Death (1995), his sf novel as by Aaron, interestingly traverses Cyberpunk tropes; the protagonist, an actor who dies on stage for a living (and is later resuscitated), finds herself implicated in a revolutionary conflict engineered by her mother. Computer viruses enter the ...
Terra Mystica
Slovenian rock band, whose first album Carsica (1998) is in effect a modernization of Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre (1863); a gnomic and inventive suite of music that elaborates a subterranean narrative. A follow-up, Axis (2002), concerns the Yggdrasil, or Axis Mundi, a mythological tree that has also attracted the attention of some sf authors. [AR]
Palmer, Thomas
(1955- ) US author whose first novel, The Transfer (1983), verges on the Technothriller, and whose second, Dream Science (1990), made some stir for its quiet (but ultimately ruthless) intelligence. The protagonist of the book is one of those capable of perceiving lines running across the physical environment that, when passed over, take one into what seem to be ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...