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Tuesday 24 May 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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Time Opera
A potentially useful item of Terminology which has yet to be generally adopted. It seems to have been coined by Anthony Boucher in his Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction editorial introduction to the first story in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol sequence, "Time Patrol" (May 1955 F&SF): / "Space operas are all very well; but for real honest swashbuckling adventure, spiced with intellectual paradoxes and startling historical contrasts, give me that rarer art form, the time opera." ...
Bannerman, Alexander
(1871-1934) UK aviator and author in whose right-wing Near Future dreadful warning tale, Leaders of the Blind (1921), Communists foment a revolution in Britain. [JC]
Shannon, John C
(? -? ) UK author of some sf interest for "The Dream of Jacques, the Anarchist" (?? Walsall Advertiser), a Future War vision involving advanced Airships and other newly developed Weapons. The tale appeared, along with some fantasies and weird fiction, in Who Shall Condemn? and Other Stories (coll 1894). Shannon's second collection, Zylgrahof and Other Stories (coll 1901), assembles similar material. D'Aubisé: A Reminiscence (1900) is nonfantastic. ...
Ollivant, Alfred
(1874-1927) UK author who had been a soldier; a riding accident left him crippled (badly for ten years), and – long before the outbreak of World War One – he turned to writing. He remains best-known for his first book, Bob, Son of Battle (1898), about a wise and subtle sheepdog; he is of sf interest for his last book, To-morrow: A Romance of the Future (1927), in which twenty-fourth century England has become a Utopia shaped according to the arts and crafts ethos of ...
Morris, Alfred
(? -? ) UK author whose Near Future Satire, Looking Ahead!: A Tale of Adventure (Not by the Author of "Looking Backward") (1892) anonymous, conveys its anti-Edward Bellamy and anti-socialist argument through a Robinsonade plot which involves its young protagonist, shipwrecked with his crew on a desert Island, in a series of political experiments in the founding of Utopia. Socialism does not work; monarchy serves well. After half a century, he returns to ...
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. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...