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Thursday 10 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Toolis, Lorna
(1952-2021) Canadian librarian and editor, initially involved in Canadian Fandom, best known for her long successful tenure as head of the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy in the Toronto Public Library system from 1986, when the collection was still known as The Spaced Out Library or SoL, until her retirement in 2017. Having shepherded with great care in a demanding ...
Winslow, Belle Hagen
Working name of Ingeborg Hagen Winslow (1872-1956) Norwegian-born author, in USA from 1920 or so. Her first novel, The White Dawn (1920), features a Lost World deep Underground in a remote region of Norway, which is discovered in the year 1000 to be inhabited by creatures primordial even then (see Time Abyss) but who turn out possibly to be survivors of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. ...
Cash, Steve
(1946-2019) US country rock musician – he was lead singer for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils from its founding in 1972 – and author of The Meq sequence of sf novels, beginning with The Meq (dated 2003 but 2002), which describe, in fantasy-tinged diction, the lives of a kind of Pariah Elite which has hidden itself since time immemorial in the Basque lands of northern Spain. Meqs remain pre-adolescent until (at sight) they recognize ...
Hoyt, Francis Deming
(1843-1922) US author whose sf novel, The Coming Storm (1913), castigates socialism, and workers' movements in general, from a conservative Catholic position in its depiction of a Near Future rising tide of oppression. [JC]
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 ...