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Wednesday 4 October 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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Horne, J Arthur
(1881-? ) US author of inspirational tales with a Christian base; God's Earth (1939) counts as sf for its use of a Time Viewer to register the pious marvels of the next age. [JC]
Davis, Gerry
(1930-1991) UK author, primarily for television, who collaborated with Kit Pedler in the creation of the menacing Cybermen for the Doctor Who storyline The Tenth Planet; these inimical Cyborgs became one of the series' most popular recurring foes. Davis was involved with fifteen Doctor Who episodes between 1966 and 1975, all of them concerning the Cybermen. Though his five Doctor Who ...
Walker, Steve
(1956- ) UK playwright, poet, illustrator and author, initially best known for his Radio plays, almost all forty of them for the BBC, beginning with "Him and It" (October 1988 Radio 4), an exercise in Absurdist SF. Other plays of interest, several similar pushing Satire into the absurd, include "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" (28 December 1994 Radio 4), adapting the ...
Innes, Michael
Pseudonym used by Scots author and academic J I M Stewart (1906-1994) for his many detective and thriller novels published from 1936 to 1986, often featuring series character John Appleby in various official roles from detective-inspector to Sir John Appleby, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, and onward through a long, active retirement. Though fantastical and donnishly whimsical, these tales normally keep sf devices at arm's length, as with the distant threat of ...
Letcher, Montgomery E
(? -? ) US author of Wonderful Discovery: Being an Account of a Recent Exploration of the Celebrated Mammoth Cave in Edmonson County, Kentucky, by Dr Rowan, Professor Simmons and Others, of Louisville, to its Termination in an Inhabited Region, in the Interior of the Earth (1839 chap): a Lost World tale told as a hoax – after the example of Edgar Allan Poe and others ...
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. ...