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Friday 14 February 2025
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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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Violet Evergarden
Japanese animated tv series (2018). Kyoto Animation. Based on the Light Novel by Kana Akatsuki (author) and Akiko Takas (illustrator). Directed by Taichi Ishidate. Written by Reiko Yoshida. Voice cast includes Yui Ishikawa, Hidenobu Kiuchi, Takehito Koyasu, Daisuke Namikawa. Thirteen broadcast 24-minute episodes, plus one OVA. Colour. / Violet Evergarden (Ishikawa) was a teenaged soldier in a recently concluded ...
Coheed and Cambria
US rock band formed in Nyack, New York in 2005. Almost all their albums form part of an overarching narrative, known as The Amory Wars, which also takes in Comic books and tie-in novels written by the band's vocalist and guitarist Claudio Sanchez (1978- ). The setting is a galaxy known as Heaven's Fence, in which Stars and planets are held in place by energy beams ("the Keywork"). ...
Drake, Nick
(1961- ) UK poet (see Poetry), screenwriter, librettist, playwright and author, variously active from the early 1980s; his detective novels, beginning with Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead (2006), are nonfantastic, as is the opera/oratorio Between Worlds (2015) by Tansy Davies (1973- ), a meditation on 9/11 for which he wrote the libretto. Drake is of sf interest for The Farewell Glacier ...
Penrose, Roger
(1931- ) UK mathematical physicist, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, who has achieved much significant work in his field. Occasional forays into recreational Mathematics include the creation, with his geneticist father Lionel Penrose (1898-1972), of the impossible ever-ascending or ever-descending Penrose staircase described in their paper "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion" ...
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 ...