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Friday 11 July 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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Dey, Frederick Van Rensselaer
(1861-1922) US lawyer and author who began to write fiction as early as 1881 under various names, and as Chickering Carter – see under that name for further details – was a central contributor to, and almost certainly the best author to be involved in, the Nick Carter series (see Nick Carter), writing at least 400 stories of varying length for the sequence. He also wrote stories, of various kinds, as by ...
Magnetic Monster, The
Film (1953). A-Men Productions/United Artists. Directed by Curt Siodmak. Written by Siodmak, Ivan Tors. Cast includes Jean Byron, Richard Carlson and King Donovan. 76 minutes. Black and white. / A new isotope, created in a laboratory, sucks in nearby energy and doubles its size every few hours; eventually it may destroy the Earth. The first part of the film shows it being tracked down by scientific investigators, puzzled at the strange magnetic ...
Gardner, Erle Stanley
(1889-1970) US lawyer and author, most famous for the eighty-two volume Perry Mason detective series beginning with The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933). He had been extremely prolific from the start of his career around 1921, publishing at least 60 stories and a novel in Pulp magazines in 1933 alone; he spent almost no time at all on sf. His first story of genre interest was "Rain Magic" for (20 October 1928 Argosy ...
Tanigawa Nagaru
(1970- ) Japanese author largely in the Light Novel (chapbook) format, whose works bridge the ever-closing gap between fans of literary sf, Manga and Anime in Japanese culture. A graduate in Law from Kwansei Gakuin University, he first published sf with Dengeki Aegis 5 ["Shock! Aegis 5"] (March 2003 Dengeki Moeō; fixup 2004), a ...
Whelan, Michael
(1950- ) American artist. After obtaining a BA in art from San Jose State University in 1973, Whelan began attending the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles; however, after displaying his artwork at a few sf conventions, he received an offer from Donald A Wollheim to paint covers for DAW Books, inspiring him to leave school and move to New York to work as a professional artist. Some of his early ...
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 ...