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Tuesday 8 October 2024
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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Palma, Félix J
(1968- ) Spanish author, who began publishing short fiction, much of it fantasy or sf, in the late 1980. The first volume of his Victorian Trilogy sequence – comprising to date El mapa del tiempo (2008; trans Nick Caistor as The Map of Time 2011) and El mapa del Cielo (2012; trans Nick Caistor as The Map of the Sky 2012) – is an Alternate History tale set in a ...
Amazons
Made-for-tv film (1984). ABE Circle Films/Buena Vista Television for ABC-TV. Produced by Stuart Cohen. Directed by Paul Michael Glaser. Written by David Solomon from a story by Solomon and Guerdon Trueblood. Cast includes Tamara Dobson, Jack Scalia, Madeleine Stowe and Jennifer Warren. 95 minutes. Colour. / In a prologue set in ancient times, a society of female warriors (see Women in SF) forms an Amazon culture which exists quietly alongside ...
Heming, J W
(1900-1953) Extremely prolific Australian author who worked in various genres under various pseudonyms, and began publishing sf novels with The Living Dead (1940); this was the first of his World War Two books with the Australian firm Currawong Publishing, which specialized in the release of native sf, US imports being banned at the time. The protagonist of a title of interest thus produced, King of the Underseas (1941 chap), finds ...
Outer Planets
For a long while, relatively little attention was paid in sf to the planets beyond Jupiter. Of them only Saturn was known to the ancients – Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930 – and it is therefore the only outer planet featured in Athanasius Kircher's and Emanuel Swedenborg's interplanetary tours. Uranus, however, is included in the anonymous ...
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 ...