SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 8 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.
Site updated on 7 October 2024
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
West, Pamela
(1945- ) US author whose novel, Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1987), is nonfantastic; her sf novel, 20/20 Vision (1990), is an intricate Time-Travel tale in which a murder in 1995 is brooded over by a detective in 2020 and solved through the agency of time-travelling archivists from 2040, who send the detective back – via a form of Computer-enhanced ...
Wagner, Z M
(? - ) US author of an sf Satire, One Nation Under George (2005), set in a very Near Future America (2004-2008) responding, under the leadership of George W Bush, to the post 9/11 world in terms of a (to outsiders) surreal exceptionalism. As with most satires of American Politics, reality outstripped the jokes. [JC]
Daud, David
Pseudonym of UK author David Alexander Pennington (1954- ), whose Space Opera The Pulse of Eternity (1991) was billed as the first volume of the Starmaker series; further instalments did not follow. [DRL/SH]
Buckner, M M
(? - ) US author and environmental activist (she has done work for the World Wildlife Fund) whose first three sf novels are set on an exceedingly grim but realistic planet Earth, though her excessively intricate plotting tends to divert attention from the harshness of the Near Future/moderately distant future she posits. HyperThought (2001) and War Surf (2005) – the latter won the ...
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 ...