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Tuesday 6 June 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 6 June 2023
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Hodder-Williams, Christopher
(1926-1995) UK author, pilot, composer and sound engineer; a member of the family which owned and managed his main early publisher. His first novel, The Cummings Report (1957) as by James Brogan, was not sf. Hodder-Williams began publishing sf with Chain Reaction (1959), which concerns itself, as does almost all of his fiction, with the relationship between Man and the machine Technology he has created, in this case through a mystery ...
Gouvieux, Marc
Pseudonym of French military pilot and author Marc Edmond de Lafargue (? -? ), used for a Future War novel, Haut les ailes! Carnet de route d'un officier aviateur pendant la guerre de 19– (1914; trans Bernard Miall as With Wings Outspread: A Romance of the War of 1920 1915): presumably because the book was written (and perhaps released) before World War One ...
Booth, Walter R
(1869-1938) UK filmmaker; initially a stage magician, Booth met British film pioneer Robert W Paul (1869-1943) and shortly after began directing for his production company, Paul's Animatograph Works. Some early films simply recorded conjuring tricks but others had a narrative element, built round Booth's ability to use his stage-magic skills for special effects in this new medium. He worked for Paul until 1906, then for Charles Urban's (1867-1942) production companies: Charles Urban Trading ...
Butterworth, Michael
(1947- ) UK author, poet, publisher and editor, in the latter capacity initially of the semiprofessional magazine Concentrate (one issue, 1968), devoted to very short stories and poems (see Flash Fiction); then of the underground Corridor (five issues 1971-1974), later called Wordworks (two issues 1975-1976), which he re-launched in 2010 as a contemporary visual arts and writing journal under the title ...
Pears, Iain
(1955- ) UK art historian and author, perhaps best known for his Jonathan Argyll series of nonfantastic detective novels featuring an art historian [not listed below]. His most influential singleton, An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), scrutinizes the same seventeenth-century intellectual revolution focused on by Neal Stephenson in his Baroque Trilogy: the metaphysics and politics attending the shift from ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...