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Tuesday 14 January 2025
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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Weiss, Jan
(1892-1972) Czech government official and author whose literary career began after active service during World War One in the Austria-Hungary army on the Russian front, where he was captured and became a prisoner of war; his wartime experiences dominate his first books. Weiss is of sf interest initially for Dům o 1000 patrech (1929; trans Alexandra Büchler as The House of a Thousand Floors 2014), an allegory-tinted novel ...
Gombrowicz, Witold
(1904-1969) Polish playwright, essayist and author whose work was not directly connected with Genre SF, though he occasionally utilized fantastic elements; his impact on Polish literature (see Poland) was unprecedented both at the level of his highly original narrative technique, for which he derived idiosyncratic diminutive forms and neologisms, and a consistent philosophy, at some points evoking associations with existentialism, ...
Wells, Martha
(1964- ) US author most of whose career has been dedicated to fantasy [a highly selected Checklist appears below], beginning with the Ile-Rien sequence whose first volume, The Element of Fire (1993; rev 2006), applies some tropes from the Fantasy of Manners toolkit [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] to colour in a tale of Magic. The second ...
Denaerde, Stefan
Pseudonym of Dutch entrepreneur and author Adriaan C M Beers (1924-1998) whose Buitenaardse beschaving: de planeet larga (1969; trans as Operation Survival Earth 1977; rev vt trans as UFO – Contact from Planet Larga: A Report of the Investigation 1982), describes a visitation of Extraterrestrials in UFOs from the planet Larga, which is abut ten light years from Earth. [JC]
Raymond, Ben
(? - ) US author of an sf novel, The Miracle of the Foomtra (1968), which involves Sex. [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, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...