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Saturday 14 September 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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Hall, Austin
(1880-1933) US author who claimed to have written over 600 stories in various pulp genres, mainly Westerns. He began publishing sf and fantasy with "Almost Immortal" for All-Story Weekly, 7 October 1916. "The Rebel Soul" (30 June 1917 All-Story Weekly) and its sequel, the book-length "Into the Infinite" (12 April-17 May 1919 All-Story Weekly), ...
Draulans, Dirk
(1956- ) Belgian biologist and author whose sf novel, De rode koningin: roman over de oorlog tussen man en vrouw (1994; trans Sam Garrett as The Red Queen: A Novel of the War Between the Sexes 1998), presents a Dystopian view of Genetic Engineering, as a ferocious woman (unusual among her ineffective, passive, technologically incompetent kind) hunts down the last fertile ...
Parasitism and Symbiosis
Parasitism and symbiosis are Nature's extreme forms of commensalism (physical association). A parasitic species promotes its own interests entirely to the detriment of the other; symbiosis refers to the much less common state in which both organisms obtain some benefit from the association. / Imaginary parasites of human beings are featured in many effective sf Horror stories, often linked to the idea of vampirism (although classical ...
Apes as Human
The heading for this entry should be seen as a rough short-hand designation for a subject whose nature is diffuse and has changed constantly over the centuries; in the second edition of this encyclopedia (1993) our remit for what was then entitled Apes and Cavemen (in the Human World) may have been unwieldy, as we used the term "cavemen" to designate subject matter that might have fitted better into other entries: mainly proto-human races, including Neanderthals, though without taking a ...
Moberg, Vilhelm
(1898-1973) Swedish playwright, nonfiction writer and author who published 18 novels, 38 stage or radio plays and 21 nonfiction books, four of them issued posthumously; he is most famous for his historical novels, perhaps primarily for his four-volume series The Emigrants (1949-1959; trans as The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The Settlers, and The Last Letter Home 1956-1959), following a group of Swedish ...
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 ...