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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 ...
Alternate Cosmos
A Term used in this encyclopedia for the special case of Parallel World universes where the laws of Physics are and always have been importantly different; some sf stories posit this kind of radical change (or the threat of such change) to our own universe. George Gamow uses the device of dreams in Mr Tompkins in Wonderland (stories 1938-1939 Discovery; ...
Charbonneau, Louis
(1924-2017) US journalist and author who also wrote nonfantastic Westerns as by Carter Travis Young; after writing some radio plays at the end of the 1940s, he worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times (1952-1971), beginning to publish sf novels with No Place on Earth (1958), about a coercive Dystopia. He produced sf for several years thereafter, publishing: Corpus Earthling (1960), about ...
Stevens, Lawrence Sterne
(1886-1960) American artist who also signed himself Stephen Lawrence or just Lawrence; some covers attributed to Lawrence were actually the work of his son Peter Stevens (1920-2001). The elder Stevens effectively learned how to draw by working as a newspaper artist and did not begin drawing for the sf Pulp magazines until the early 1940s, when the demand for newspaper illustration was diminishing. He was most admired for his interior illustrations, which became his ...
Thomas, Eugene E
(1894-? ) US author of occult works; those with some sf relevance include Fragments from the Past (1930), whose protagonist is sent by Timeslip to Atlantis, where he warns selected Atlanteans of the catastrophe to come; and Brotherhood of Mt Shasta (1946), whose protagonist meets Secret Masters Underground, who return him to ...
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. ...