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Thursday 5 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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Uncanny Tales
1. A US weird-menace Pulp magazine published by Manvis Publications, New York, and edited by Robert O Erisman (uncredited); five issues, April/May 1939 to May 1940. The first issue is volume 2, number 6, because it was a retitling of Star Detective, another weird-menace pulp, which had run from May 1935 to November 1938. It was a companion to Marvel Science Stories, and bore the usual lurid covers showing a young ...
Hoyt, Richard
(1941- ) US journalist and author in whose first novel, The Manna Enzyme (1982), Fidel Castro (1926-2016) plays a positive role, with the CIA and KGB seen negatively, in Near Future attempts to promulgate an Invention – the manna enzyme of the title – capable of ending world starvation. Most of Hoyt's works are thrillers; two of the John Denson sequence – ...
Barthelme, Donald
(1931-1989) US author known primarily as a surrealist and black humorist. Most of his short fiction and at least three of his four novels can be described as Fabulations (see also Absurdist SF): Snow White (1967), an absurdist dissection of the fairy tale; The Dead Father (1975), in which the giant figure of a moribund Father is escorted with trauma and ritual to its final resting place; and ...
Baker, Will
Working name of US teacher, environmentalist and author William Edwin Baker (1935-2005), who began his publishing career with Syntax in English Poetry (1967) as William E Baker, his career as a writer of fiction with Chip (1979), one of several novels deeply involved in the world of the American West, and his short career as an sf writer with Shadow Hunter (1993), a post-Disaster tale in which, after a kind of last war has ...
Huchu, T L
(1982- ) Zimbabwean author, resident in Scotland from 2010 at the latest; his first novels, including The Hairdresser of Harare (2010), An Untimely Love (2010) and The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician (2014), all as by Tendai Huchu, are nonfantastic [they are not listed below]. He began publishing work of genre interest with "The Sale" in AfroSf: Science Fiction by African Writers (anth 2012) edited by ...
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 ...