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Monday 27 June 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.
Site updated on 20 June 2022
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Moriarty, Chris
(1968- ) US author whose Spin sequence of high-tech Space Operas – comprising Spin State (2003), Spin Control (2006), which won the Philip K Dick Award in 2007, and Ghost Spin (2013) – expertly embeds genuinely hard Hard SF concepts in a narrative dominated by a fast-mouthed female protagonist named Li with Cyberpunk-derived street-cred. The underlying premise – "quantum entanglements", possible at just a little above absolute zero, can motor AIs of ...
Greer, Gery
(1944- ) US author, all of whose books have been written in collaboration with her husband, Bob Ruddick; her work is exclusively aimed at the younger end of the Young Adult market, and includes two series, the Max and Me sequence beginning with Max and Me and the Time Machine (1983) with Bob Ruddick, in which a piece of junk turns out to be a time machine that carries young Max (see Time Travel) into medieval England; and the Jason sequence beginning with Jason and the ...
Vernes, Henri
Pseudonym of Belgian author Charles-Henri-Jean Dewisme (1918-2021), in France 1946-1949, prolific producer of Pulp-style adventure novels in various genres from the mid-1940s. His most popular series, the Bob Morane sequence beginning with La Vallée Infernale ["The Valley of Hell"] (1953; trans anon as Bob Moran in the Valley of Hell 1960) ends, more than 200 volumes later, with L'énigme du pôle: La chose dane les glaces ["The Enigma of the Pole: The Thing in the Glacier"] ...
Foigny, Gabriel de
(circa 1630-1692) French author of an early Fantastic Voyage, La Terre Australe Connue: C'est-à-dire la description de ce pays inconnu jusqu'ici, de se moeurs et de ses coûtumes. Par M. Sadeur (1676 Switzerland; cut vt Les avantures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte et le voiage de la terre australe 1692; trans anon of cut vt, as A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, or the Southern World 1693; new trans David Fausett of the original version, as The Southern Land, ...
Reida, Alvah
(1920-1975) US author whose sf novel, Fault Lines (1972) – not to be confused with Kate Wilhelm's later novel of the same title – deals apocalyptically with the Disasters that afflict America of a San Andreas Fault earthquake caused, at least in part, by an unwary use of thermonuclear devices. [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. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...