SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 12 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 ...
deFord, Miriam Allen
(1888-1975) US author, editor and feminist, who was active as a journalist and editor from 1912; married to the distinguished nonfiction author Maynard Shipley (1872-1934) from 1921; she worked as a researcher for Charles Fort between 1922 and his death in 1932; she was the San Francisco correspondent for the socialist Federated Press from 1921 to 1956, and a contributing editor to The Humanist. For the educational publisher Haldeman-Julius she wrote ...
Bickham, Jack M
(1930-1997) US author who began publishing sf with Kane's Odyssey (1976) as by Jeff Clinton, and who later wrote two sf novels under his own name. ARIEL (1984) posits a Computer whose AI is both charming and alarming. Day Seven (1988) is a Technothriller. [JC]
Technology
Although various literary traditions supplied inspiration and continued support to Proto SF, it was the perception of the power which the new Machines of the Industrial Revolution had to transform the world which gave birth to sf itself, inspiring Jules Verne's imaginary voyages, George Griffith's Future-War stories, H G ...
Snedeker, Caroline Dale
(1871-1956) US author, initially of children's books, some of them depicting life in versions of New Harmony, the town of her birth being named after the communitarian Utopia New Harmony created by her grandfather Robert Owen (1771-1858). Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community (1917) is a fictionalized (and fantasticated) biography of an experimental Scientist and early resident of New Harmony, Indiana, which had ...
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 ...