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Friday 17 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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Glossop, Reginald
(1880-1955) UK author, long resident in France, whose The Coming Invasion!: How It May Be Prevented (1910 chap), is an unalarming Future War tract; he also wrote a few stories for Boys' Papers in the 1920s. Glossop is remembered almost exclusively for The Orphan of Space: A Tale of Downfall (1926), which lamely prefigures C S Lewis's Ransom trilogy in the conceit ...
McCoy, Max
(1958- ) US journalist and author whose novel – Jesse: A Novel of the Outlaw Jesse James (1999), in which the outlaw survives to tell his story to Mark Twain – veers close to Alternate History. Of his other work, a series of Ties to the Indiana Jones Shared World series, derived from but not replicating the film ...
Houghton, Claude
Working name of UK author Claude Houghton Oldfield (1889-1961), known primarily outside the sf field. Unfit for active service in World War One, he served in the Admiralty. Some pining frustration at a missed destiny can be detected in the poems assembled as his first book, The Phantom Host and Other Verses (coll 1917 chap); the Pastoral calm depicted in the titular verse-drama from ...
Anderson, Maxwell
(1888-1959) US journalist, teacher, screenwriter and playwright, active from around 1910, his first play "White Desert" being performed in 1923; he frequently espoused pacifist arguments in his work, and gained perhaps a reputation for steely intransigence that the plays themselves, which combine the homely and the sonorous (occasionally in blank verse), did not entirely warrant. He wrote the script for one fantasy film, Death Takes a Holiday (1934) directed by Mitchell Leisen, in ...
Space Quest
Videogame series (from 1986). Sierra On-Line (SOL). / Space Quest is a series of linearly plotted graphical Adventures in which the player adopts the role of Roger Wilco, a janitor in a Space Opera universe who strongly resembles the protagonist of the text-based Planetfall (1983). The games' parodic style of humour and comic puzzles are alternately ...
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 ...