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Thursday 19 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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Danielewski, Mark Z
(1966- ) US author who gained considerable attention for his first novel House of Leaves (2000). It is not technically a work of Fantastika, as the elements of horror (see Horror in SF) in its detailed account of a family's ordeal, in a house that opens upon enormous and sinister spaces (see Creepypasta; Labyrinths), prove to be part of a text produced by an unreliable narrator; but the intensity of its dramatization, and the richness of detail in Danielewski's ...
Shedley, Ethan I
Pseudonym of Belgian-born software engineer and author Boris Beizer (1934-2018), in the US from May 1941; most of his publications [not listed below] concern computer system architecture and software testing. In his novel Earth Ship and Star Song (1979) the survivors of destructive Climate Change escape from the Ruined Earth, but while developing their Faster Than Light Starship drive inadvertently create a Black Hole that destroys a solar system and its Telepathic inhabitants; humans are then ...
Wallis, G McDonald
(1925-2011) US actress – under the names Hope Campbell and Kathy McDonald – and author; as by Hope Campbell, she wrote non-fantastic romance tales for about a decade from about 1943, and some Young Adult novels, including Looking for Hamlet: A Haunting at Deeping Lake (1987); as by Virginia Hughes, she wrote the Young Adult Peggy Lane Theatres Stories sequence of mild non-fantastic adventure tales; she also wrote at least one similar tale as by True Summers. The Light of Lilith ...
Koch, Eric
(1919-2018) German-born author and television producer, in UK from 1935, in Canada from 1940, several of whose novels are of some sf interest. In The French Kiss: A Tongue in Cheek Political Fantasy (1969), set in a Near-Future Canada threatened – as usual – by separatism, a Reincarnated colleague of Napoleon muses on de Gaulle's similarity to the long-dead Emperor. The Leisure Riots: A Comic Novel (1973) suggests Satirically that, in 1980, the enforced leisure of the executive ...
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
(1809-1894) US poet, essayist, editor, medical doctor and author, of sf interest in the latter capacity for Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (January 1860-April 1861 The Atlantic Monthly as "The Professor's Story"; 1861 2vols), in which the classic fantasy and supernatural topos of the Lamia is reconstructed in terms of Biology: the eponymous young female, having been "poisoned" in the womb with rattlesnake venom (see Poison), grows up half-ophidian: her blood is cold; her bite venomous; she ...
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 ...