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Saturday 21 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.
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McKinley, Robin
(1952- ) US-born author, in UK for many years, married to Peter Dickinson from 1992 until his death, with whom she has written the Elementals fantasy sequence. For most of her early career she concentrated on fantasy, beginning with what may remain her most famous single tale, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast (1978), an early and influential Revisionist Fantasy [for that entry, for Robin McKinley's fantasy work before 1997, and for Twice-Told see ...
Harper, Harry
(1880-1960) UK author with Claude Grahame-White of two sf juveniles: The Air-King's Treasure (1913) and The Invisible War-Plane: A Tale of Air Adventure in the Great Campaign (1915). In the latter an Airship is concealed by paint which (it is claimed) neither absorbs nor reflects light. Much later Harper wrote two solo works of semifictional Futures Studies, Winged World: The Coming of the Air Age (1946), where something like a planetary Pax Aeronautica is anticipated, and Dawn of the Space Age ...
Yager, Jeff
(1990- ) US author in whose Young Adult Near Future novel Atom and Eve (2013) a new Drug designed to fight a killer flu has significant side-effects (see Gender; Sex). Much is learned by the young protagonists. [JC]
Release the Spyce
Japanese animated tv series (2018). Lay-duce. Created by Sorasaki F, Takahiro and Namori. Directed by Akira Sato. Written by Aoi Akashiro and Takahiro. Voice cast includes Yukari Anzai, Akane Fujita, Shizuka Ito, Yuri Noguchi, Manami Numakura, Aya Suzaki, Risa Taneda and Aya Uchida. Twelve 25-minute episodes. Colour. / The Tsukikage crime fighting team comprises six ninja schoolgirls whose enhanced skills come from a Drug called Spyce, which only works – in an Anime-obliging example ...
Godwin, George Stanley
(1889-1974) UK lawyer and author, in Canada between 1911 and 1916, prophetically lamenting in his first novel, The Eternal Forest Under Western Skies (1929), the failure of Canadian society to merit its occupancy of the land it had been granted; most of his work is nonfiction on various topics. Of sf interest is Empty Victory (1932), in which the UK and France stupidly engage with each other in a 1951 Future War. [JC]
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 ...