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Sunday 7 December 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Hruska, Alan
(1933-2022) US attorney, publisher, filmmaker, playwright, screenwriter and author whose sf novel, Borrowed Time (1984), attempts with some success to suggest analogies and crossings between various Parallel Worlds and the bicameral human brain (see Julian Jaynes). His first two films, both dramas involving the law, appeared in the twenty-first century. [JC]
O'Shea, Patti
Pseudonym of US author Patti J Olszowka (? - ), much of whose romantic fiction is nonfantastic, though her most substantial series, the Light Warriors sequence beginning with In the Midnight Hour (2007), is Paranormal Romance [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. She is of sf interest in particular for the Jarved Nine sequence beginning with ...
Cosy Catastrophe
A term coined by Brian W Aldiss in Billion Year Spree (1973) to describe the supposedly comforting ambience shed by the sort of Disaster tale told by UK writers like John Wyndham (see also Holocaust; Post-Holocaust). Though later critical work on Wyndham has emphasized the ambiguities and darknesses of his work, the ...
Buckner, M M
(? - ) US author and environmental activist (she has done work for the World Wildlife Fund) whose first three sf novels are set on an exceedingly grim but realistic planet Earth, though her excessively intricate plotting tends to divert attention from the harshness of the Near Future/moderately distant future she posits. HyperThought (2001) and War Surf (2005) – the latter won the ...
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 ...