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Friday 13 December 2024
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Irving, Washington
(1783-1859) The father of the US short story and one of the first US professional authors, Irving is an important link in the transfer of the stories of German Romanticism to American soil. Although he studied as a lawyer and briefly pursued that career, his heart was always in writing, and he began publishing essays as early as 1802 in the New York Morning Chronicle, the first of his numerous pseudonyms being Jonathan Oldstyle. He soon produced a number of humorous satirical essays, and ...
O'Neil, Vincent
(? - ) US author, active from around 2005, who has written detective fiction and horror under his own name. As Henry V O'Neil he is of sf interest for his Military SF series, the Sim War sequence beginning with Glory Main (2012), which begins in fairly typical fashion with its protagonist soldier forced into an extreme situation in a Space Opera frame, as the war with ...
Taylor, W T
(? -? ) UK author of fiction for boys, who also wrote as by John Bredon and Dave Gregory. Lord of the Incas (7 July-6 October 1934 Ranger; 1935) as by Dave Gregory is a Lost Race tale set in South America; in the Near Future The Great Disaster: A Story of 2000 A.D. (1935 chap) as by John Bredon, Britain suffers under a dictatorship and a ...
Automation
The idea that mechanical production processes might one day free mankind from the burden of labour is a common utopian dream, exemplified by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) and its modern counterpart, Mack Reynolds's Looking Backward from the Year 2000 (1973). But the dream has its nightmarish aspects, as hinted at in the manufacture and display of ...
Jonny Quest
1. Animated tv series (1964-1965; vt The Adventures of Jonny Quest). Hanna-Barbera Productions/Screen Gems/Warner Brothers Television for ABC-TV. Created and designed by Doug Wildey. Directed by William Hanna, Joseph Barbera. Writers included Walter Black, Joanna Lee, Wildey, Herbert Finn, and Alex Lovy. Cast includes Danny Bravo, Cathy Lewis, Tim Matheson, Don Messick, Vic Perrin, Mike Road and John Stephenson. 26 25-minute episodes. ...
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 ...