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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 ...
Speculative Fiction
Item of Terminology used by some writers and critics in place of "science fiction". Its first known use is by the reviewer M F Egan in "Book-Talk" (October 1899 Lippincott's Monthly Magazine), which describes Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) as "speculative fiction". In the symposium published as Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing (anth 1947) edited by ...
Edwards, Nicky
(1958- ) The author – perhaps UK – of Stealing Time (1990), set in a Dystopia whose protagonists' sabotage of an invidious system is examined from a lesbian standpoint (see Gender). [JC]
Peirce, Hayford
(1942-2020) US author, in Tahiti for the most active decades of his career, who also wrote crime thrillers; he began publishing sf with "Unlimited Warfare" in Analog for November 1974 and established a name for lightly written tales whose backgrounds were unusually well conceived. "Mail Supremacy" (March 1975 Analog) begins a series of tales – much later assembled as Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars (coll 2001) ...
Element of Crime, The
Film (1984). Kærne Film presents in association with the Danish Film Institute a Per Holst Film Production. Original title (in Danish) Forbrydelsens Element. Directed by Lars von Trier. Written by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel. Director of Photography Tom Elling. Cast includes Michael Elphick, Ahmed El Shenawi, Astrid Henning-Jensen, János Herskó, Esmond Knight, Meme Lai and Jerold Wells. 104 minutes. Colour. / Washed-up detective Fisher (Elphick) ...
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, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...