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Monday 27 June 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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Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan
(1950- ) US teacher, editor, academic and critic, with DePauw University from 1983, full professor from 1997; he initially signed his name Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, but began not to do so after the death of his father Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (1917-1990), also an author, who published in Hungarian. His overall involvement in sf, over and above his teaching activities, may be divided into two broad categories: his work as an editor, particularly as a founding editor of ...
SF Reprise
At the time when both magazines were being published by Roberts & Vinter, some unsold issues of New Worlds and Science Fantasy were bound up in twos and threes and sold as SF Reprise, which had six numbers: all undated but probably 1966. #1, #2 and #5 were assembled from New Worlds; #3, #4 and #6 were from Science Fantasy. For convenience we term these publications Anthologies. Two of the volumes contain entire serial novels, though not in contiguous instalments and thus not regarded by ...
Hornaday, William T
(1854-1937) US naturalist and taxidermist – chief taxidermist with the Smithsonian Institution from 1882, and first director of the Bronx Zoo, beginning in 1896 – and author, in whose Lost Race tale, The Man Who Became A Savage; A Story of Our Times (1896), a jaded American flees to Borneo, where he discovers an unknown civilization of headhunters. [JC]
Coxwell, Henry
(1819-1900) UK balloonist, editor and author; working under the name Henry Wells he was founder and editor of The Balloonist; Or, Aerostatic Magazine in 1845, which lasted only until 1847. His interest in piloting Balloons extended, through at least one dangerous crash, until his retirement from flying in 1885. Of some sf interest is A Knight of the Air; Or, the Aereal Rivals (1895) in which flight is achieved, not through an advanced balloon, but in a heavier-than-air machine launched by a ...
Newton, Alex
(? -? ) UK author of an sf novel, Posterity: Its Verdicts and its Methods; Or, Democracy A D 2010 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1897) anonymous, a Sleeper Awakes tale whose protagonist discovers the Utopian world of 2010, which has evolved on lines described by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward (1888). Much of the text is given over to discussion. [JC]
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 ...