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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 ...
Survivalist Fiction
During the near-half century of Cold War after the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan in 1945, nuclear Holocausts were a commonplace plot device in various genres of popular fiction. Some novels took readers teasingly up to the brink without actually carrying them into the terminal moments; Cold War thrillers of this sort are not generally treated in this encyclopedia. A rather larger number of novels treated the final war as a given, ...
Fleming, Peter
(1907-1971) UK journalist, author and travel writer, brother of Ian Fleming, known mainly for such travel books as Brazilian Adventure (1933), whose gritty irreverence (both for the place visited and for the visitor) made him famous. In his spoof sf novel, The Flying Visit (1940), Adolf Hitler parachutes into the UK with amusing results (the book was published before Rudolf Hess's actual descent upon Scotland in May 1941). The tale was ...
Bosse, Malcolm
(1926-2002) US author of novels for adult and Young Adult readerships, best known for The Warlord (1983) which, like most of his work, is an historical fiction. Of genre interest are Cave Beyond Time (1980), whose orphaned, 15-year-old protagonist Time Travels from an Arizona archaeological dig to three different ancient eras, where he undergoes rites of passage into acceptance of his maturing self; and ...
Counterblast
Film (1948; vt Devil's Plot US). British National Films/Pathé Pictures Ltd. UK/Herbert Bregstein US. Produced by Louis H Jackson. Directed by Paul L Stein. Written by Jack Whittingham from a story by Guy Morgan. Cast includes Robert Beatty, Anthony Eustrel, Mervyn Johns and Nova Pilbeam. 90 minutes. Black and white. / 1948: Nazi bacteriologist Dr Bruckner (Johns), "The Beast of Ravensbruck", escapes from a POW camp with two colleagues. He murders Australian Dr Forrester ...
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 ...