SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 5 December 2024
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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Squire, J C
(1884-1958) UK author, poet, essayist, historian and literary editor whose health barred him from active service in World War One, though he was active in the Home Guard; he also wrote as by Solomon Eagle. Some of his fiction – like "The March of Progress" about Atlantis, in The Gold Tree (coll 1917 chap) – was of modest sf interest; some of the Parodies assembled in ...
Vlahos, Len
(? - ) US rock musician, bookseller and author of Young Adult tales, initially nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for his fourth novel, Hard Wired (2020), the first-person confession of an AI from the point "he" becomes aware of his nature at the age of ten; after running through his invented past, he more or less takes over the Internet, applying his vast ...
Warren Publishing
US magazine publisher founded in 1957, named after its founder James Warren (1930- ) and active for several decades. Warren launched Forrest J Ackerman's monster/sf/Monster Movies film magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland in 1958; this had many imitators in the 1960s and 1970s, most short-lived. Ackerman also produced ...
Baker, W Howard
(1925-1991) Working name of Irish journalist, editor and author Arthur Athwill William Baker, in the UK after World War Two. After working as an editor of Panther Books he began to write for the Sexton Blake Library in 1955, soon taking over as editor of the series for Amalgamated Press, writing many titles under various names, and in 1965 taking the series to Mayflower Books, where it flourished briefly. He then set up his own publishing imprint, which ...
Hossain, Saad Z
(1979- ) Bangladeshi author whose first novel, Baghdad Immortals (2013; vt Escape from Baghdad! 2015), treats the world of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein as a surreal nightmare (see Imperialism; Satire; War); the tale traces the appalled and appalling "antics" of its two protagonists as they attempt to smuggle a torturer out of the land he has helped ...
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 ...