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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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Harrison, G B
(1894-1991) UK scholar, editor of three editions of the works of William Shakespeare, perhaps now best known for his five-volume compilation/recreation of Elizabethan and Jacobean journals beginning with An Elizabethan Journal: Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked About During the Years 1591-1594 (1928); mostly in the USA or elsewhere abroad after 1943. Of sf interest is The Fires of Arcadia (1965), in which a scientist ...
Pollock, Frank Lillie
(1876-1956) US-born author, in Canada from childhood; active in magazines like The Black Cat from 1898 till around 1930, his most famous individual story being "Finis" (June 1906 Argosy), in which a deadly Ray, or perhaps more accurately radiance – generated by a giant star at the centre of the universe – causes the End of the World in the 1930s; ...
Tonks, Angela
(1913-2003) UK author, in the USA from 1959, whose Mind Out of Time (1958) deals with a telepathic relationship (see ESP) between two men, beginning when they are both incarcerated during World War Two, and moving uneasily into the Cold War, where the intimacy must be broken. [JC]
Droids
German 1970s electro-disco group. Their album Star Peace (1978) contains eight science-fictional songs that attempt, in unauthorized and unembarrassed fashion (most obviously in the opening track "Can You Feel the Force?"), to cash in on the success of Star Wars (1977), from whose popularization of the term Droid the band's name was derived. [AR]
Wager, Walter
(1924-2004) US crime and spy-thriller author who also wrote as John Tiger and (his first and second names) Walter Herman. His borderline-sf political suspense thriller Viper Three (1971), in which escaped prisoners take over a US nuclear missile silo and blackmail the government with threats of a launch that will trigger World War Three, was adapted for Cinema with a somewhat different slant and ending as ...
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. ...