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Friday 22 September 2023
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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Toombs, Alfred
(1912-1986) US author in whose Good as Gold (1955), a Satire set in Near Future Washington, District of Columbia, the Transmutation of gold, reversing the traditional alchemical process, produces shit. [JC]
Amazing Stories Quarterly
US letter-size Magazine, companion to Amazing (but twice as thick) and successor to Amazing Stories Annual. 22 issues, Winter 1928-Fall 1934, first under the aegis of Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company and later (1929-1934), edited by T O'Conor Sloane after Gernsback had lost control, under the various ...
Cicero
(106-43 BCE) Marcus Tullius Cicero, celebrated Roman orator and author of many works. He is included here for his interplanetary fable Somnium Scipionis ["The Dream of Scipio"] which is part of his De re publica ["On the Republic"] (51 BCE). In this terse but suggestive text the historical figure Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus is taken by the spirit of his adoptive grandfather, the famous Scipio Africanus, up through the planetary spheres of a Ptolemaic solar system. ...
Monsarrat, Nicholas
(1910-1979), UK soldier, in active service 1940-1946, and author; his surname was misspelled on his birth certificate as "Montserrat", causing some later confusion; in Canada as a British information officer from 1953 to 1956, and intermittently after that date. He was best known for his novel, The Cruel Sea (1951), which became immensely popular. The first of the four volumes of his Signs of the Times series, The Time Before This (1962), which is sf, tells of ...
Future, Steve
Almost certainly a pseudonym, possibly of UK fan and author Steve Gilroy (? - ), who was responsible for two sf novels: Doomed Nation of the Skies! (1953 chap), in which an intrepid reporter is taken against his will to Mars, where he must oppose a dictator; and Slave Traders of the Sky (1954 chap), which is set on an inhabited Venus where internecine warfare causes problems. ...
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. ...