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Wednesday 15 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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Murphy, Derryl
(1963- ) Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Father Time" for Tesseracts4 (anth 1992) edited by Michael Skeet and Lorna Toolis, which he assembled with other early work in Wasps at the Speed of Sound (coll 2005). An acute sense of the state of the planet in the very Near Future drives much of this work: a tale like "Day's Hunt" (1996 ...
Podwil, Jerome
(1938- ) American artist, sometimes credited simply as Podwil, who typically signs his works Jerry Podwil. After graduating from the Pratt School of Art and Design in 1960, Podwil began painting covers for non-genre books, mostly Westerns, and in 1965 shifted to sf art with several assignments from Ace Books. His early covers generally juxtaposed realistic figures with misty or symbolic backgrounds to evoke a ...
Hickman, Stephen
(1949-2021) US artist working in the fields of both sf and fantasy, credited usually as Stephen Hickman, occasionally as Stephen F Hickman or Steve Hickman, and in a couple of early instances erroneously as Steven Hickman. He attended art school for two years at the Richmond Professional Institute (Virginia Commonwealth University) alongside such future luminaries as Michael W Kaluta, Phil Trumbo and Charles Vess. His ...
Holmes, F Ratcliffe
Working name of Frederick William Ratcliffe-Holmes (circa 1878-1952) UK naturalist, film-producer and author whose The Secret People: Adventure in Africa (1928) is a Lost Race tale set in Africa, where an Ancient Egyptian civilization is discovered by the Young Adult protagonists. [JC]
Westlake, Michael
(1942- ) UK author and editor, much of whose work has been in film studies. One Zero and the Night Controller (1980) is a Fabulation in which a taxi driver tracks down an occult nocturnal mystery; Imaginary Women (1987) plays with questions of Perception as conveyed through the hallucinations of film; and in 51 Soko: To the Islands on the Other Side of the World (1990) ...
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 ...