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Monday 17 February 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.
Site updated on 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Teed, Cyrus Reed
(1839-1908) US author whose The Cellular Cosmogony; Or, the Earth a Concave Sphere [for full title see Checklist below] (1898) as by Koresh, argues in barely fictionalized terms for the existence of the Hollow Earth. Of more direct sf interest is The Great Red Dragon; Or, the Flaming Devil of the Orient (1909) as by Lord Chester, a Yellow Peril tale set in the ...
Back Brain Recluse
UK Semiprozine, from June 1984 to October 2002; edited by Chris Reed initially at Smallfield, Surrey, then (from issue #9) from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and from #16 from Sheffield, South Yorkshire; 24 issues, published at irregular intervals but usually twice a year, but after issue #21 (November 1992) there was only one issue each in 1994, 1997 and 2002. It began as a slim-but-ambitious A5 format xeroxed Fanzine but switched to A4 ...
Afrofuturism
A term coined by Mark Dery in "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose" (1993 South Atlantic Quarterly) for a literary and cultural treatment of the African diaspora in terms of, or incorporating tropes from, the genres of sf, Fantasy and Magic Realism, as seen from a Black cultural viewpoint; not a subgenre of sf but a genre that intersects sf. The sf novels of Octavia ...
Hammond, Aubrey
(1894-1940) UK set designer, art director and illustrator, well known in these capacities; in active service during World War One. His first film as art director, Hyde Park Corner (1935), directed by Sinclair Hill, is Fantasy. Hammond is of importance as an sf illustrator almost solely for one work, his remarkably strong wraparound Art Deco cover for the first English translation of Thea ...
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 ...