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Thursday 30 March 2023
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 29 March 2023
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Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Gamboe, Scott
(1969- ) US author whose Avenger sequence, comprising The Killing Frost (2006) and New Dawn Rising (2009), is Military SF set within an interstellar Space Opera venue, where a human coalition, corrupted from within by politicians, comes close to war with an Alien counterpart hegemony; the hero of the tale breaks all the rules in order to gain ...
Thorne, Anthony
(1904-1973) UK playwright and author whose Thirteen O'Clock: A Play in Three Acts (1929) is set mostly in an unnamed "super City" in the moderately distant Near Future, where despite the efforts of its brave protagonist – who with the aid of his Invention of a powerful explosive blows up buildings as an act of protest – it proves impossible to destabilize rampant capitalism. The ...
Cold War
The prolonged post-World War Two (roughly 1946-1991) state of tension between the West – principally the USA and its NATO allies – and the Warsaw Pact countries headed by the USSR was inevitably reflected in sf written in the shadow of what at times seemed to be an inevitable nuclear World War Three. Such past hopes of salvation as the Pax Aeronautica were no longer even ...
Watts, Nigel
(1957-? ) UK author in whose sf novel, Twenty Twenty (1995), which is punningly set in 2020, a writer has established a Keep in an abandoned factory in northern Canada, a finds himself haunted by a Virtual Reality connection with researchers in California. [JC]
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. ...