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Friday 27 May 2022
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.
Site updated on 23 May 2022
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Jennison, John W
(1911-1980) UK author, one of several who became active as mass-producers of genre fiction for UK paperback houses and who remained reticent about personal details during their careers. From about 1945 to the year in which it is thought he may have died, Jennison seems to have written over 100 novels under at least forty pseudonyms, mostly thrillers and Westerns; he began to publish routine but occasionally engaging sf with two novels as Edgar Rees Kennedy, Conquerors of Venus (1951) and The ...
Loch Ness Monster
Scotland's mythical Loch Ness Monster – so called since 1933 and gaining international fame soon after, is generally explained in sf as a surviving aquatic Dinosaur or dinosaur colony, as in William J Makin's "The Monster of the Loch" (20 January-3 March 1934 Pearson's Weekly) with Leslie Arliss (1901-1987); Leslie Charteris's Saint story "The Convenient Monster" (March 1959 The Saint Magazine); Lionel Fanthorpe's "The Loch Ness Terror" (January 1960 Supernatural Stories #38) as by Bron ...
Rienow, Leona
(1903-1983) US author whose short Dark Pool Prehistoric SF sequence for children comprises The Bewitched Caverns (1948) and The Dark Pool (1949). With her husband Robert Rienow (1909-1989), a political scientist, she later wrote The Year of the Last Eagle (1970), a sour Near-Future comedy about Ecology, set in 1989. The hero's job, dejectedly earthbound after a decade in synchronous orbit, is to locate the last bald eagles (the national bird of America), if any still exist. [JC/PN]
Tékumel
Role Playing Game setting. Designed by M A R Barker. / Tékumel is a richly realized future milieu, depicted in a Science Fantasy mode analogous to that employed by Marion Zimmer Bradley for her world of Darkover. The setting is arguably comparable with J R R Tolkien's Secondary World of Middle-Earth and Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia in its depth and complexity; its languages, scripts, technologies, taxonomies and cultural mores have all been explored in considerable detail. As with ...
Love, Death and Robots
US animated online tv series (2019-current). Blur Studio for Netflix. Created by Tim Miller. Executive Producers Joshua Donen, David Fincher, Jennifer Miller and Tim Miller. Directors include Léon Bérelle, Dominique Boidin, Rémi Kozyra, Maxime Luère, Victor Maldonado, Tim Miller, Gabriele Pennacchioli, Alfredo Torres and Robert Valley. Main adapter Philip Gelatt. Voice cast includes Elly Condron, Peter Franzen, Zita Hanrot, Michael B Jordan, John DiMaggio, Maurice ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...