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Saturday 29 January 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.
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Sturgeon, Theodore
(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new first name; Argyll (1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter Sturgeon wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these name changes; partner of Jayne Tannehill 1976-1985. Certainly Sturgeon early suffered or entered into several exiles: illness cut him off ...
Panshin, Alexei
Working name of US author Alexis Adams Panshin (1940- ), married to Cory Panshin; initially most active in sf Fandom, in this role doing considerable writing and editing, for which he won a Hugo for best fan writer in 1967. His first professional sale was the non-sf "A Piece of Pie" (November 1960 Seventeen); he began publishing sf stories with "Down to the Worlds of Men" (July 1963 If), and soon became an active author of both fiction and criticism. The story "Dark ...
Perry, Richard
(1944- ) US author of Changes (1974), an Equipoisal tale in which a sinister, Immortal Mad Scientist may in fact have supernatural powers in his threats to turn all humanity black: which is seen as a solution or a curse. [JC]
DeVito, Joe
(1957- ) US artist and sculptor, sometimes as Joseph DeVito, who graduated from the Parsons School of Design in 1981, studied further at the New York Art Students League, and takes a special interest in palaeontological subjects. He has produced many genre book and magazine covers since 1984, including Dinosaur images for the vt of David A Drake's Time Safari (coll of linked stories 1982; exp vt Tyrannosaur 1994) and – in skeletal form – for Michael Swanwick's ...
Children of the Night
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema Fanzine printed on middle-grade paper. Published by Derek Jensen. Editors: Derek Jensen and Matthew Le Master. Ten issues, 1975 to 1985. / A high-quality fanzine with a very irregular schedule, this title carried a great deal of material on the performer Christopher Lee plus considerable amount of coverage of sf films and Television, the latter including such productions as the series Space: 1999 (1975-1977). Among the films examined were Jaws (1975), ...
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 ...