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Friday 22 September 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.
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Schorer, Mark
(1908-1977) US author and academic, little associated with the literatures of the fantastic except for some stories with August Derleth, with whom he shared a birth city as well as attendance at the University of Wisconsin, where they wrote sf like "Riders in the Sky" (May 1928 Weird Tales), about Moon dwellers who come down to Earth to eat folk. Some of their later work was assembled as ...
Olsen, Bob
Working name of US teacher, advertising copywriter, real estate agent and author Alfred Johannes Olsen Jr (1884-1956), who began publishing sf with "The Four-Dimensional Roller-Press" for Amazing in June 1927; this was the first of several tales in the Four-Dimensional sequence. Other tales featured Professor Archimedes Banning, whose exploits were patterned on the model of the Edisonade. One magazine story, ...
Dix, Shane
(1960- ) Welsh-born author in Australia who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Moment" in Thyme Fiction 4 (anth 1990) edited by Peter McNamara, but who has been in Australia for most of his life, where he has written novels exclusively to date in collaboration with Sean Williams, beginning with the first volume of the apparently aborted Cogal sequence, The Unknown Soldier (1995) with Sean ...
Howard, Keble
Pseudonym of UK author John Keble Bell (1875-1928), whose novel of genre interest, The Peculiar Major: An Almost Incredible Story (1919), hovers Equipoisally between fantasy and sf, as its subtitle hints. The Invisibility which allows a British army officer to perform heroic exploits in World War One – while clearly influenced by H G Wells's ...
Montgomerie, F W
(? -? ) Unidentified author, perhaps Australian, of Paying the Price (1907), about a Mad Scientist in Australia who develops a strain of plague to eliminate the weak (see Eugenics; Pandemic) from the human race. [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 ...