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Sunday 16 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.
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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 ...
Van der Graaf Generator
UK prog-rock band comprising Peter Hammill, Hugh Robert Banton (1949- ) and Guy Evans (1947- ). Highly regarded in the narrow world of English prog, the group released a series of musically soursweet and ornately complex albums whose obscure lyrics trace out fantastical versions of ordinary life that shade, often, into a more structured fabulation. The first album, The Aerosol Grey Machine (1969), ...
Shea, Kieran
(1965- ) US author most of whose short fiction is nonfantastic; he is of sf interest primarily for the Koko sequence of gonzo adventures beginning with Koko Takes a Holiday (2014). The eponymous female protagonist, retired from mercenary work (see Military SF), has invested in a brothel in The Sixty Islands, an artificial Archipelago where simulated contests (see ...
Newman, John [2]
(? - ) US academic and librarian who was credited as Special Collections Librarian at Colorado State University Libraries when he began to publish work of genre interest with a two-part Bibliography of Future War fiction, "America at War: Horror Stories for a Society" in Extrapolation for December 1974 and May 1975. This work led to the ...
Poore, Michael
(1967- ) US author whose first novel, Up Jumps the Devil (2012), is a supernatural fantasy whose Antihero protagonist, John Scratch, is in fact the Devil; he has come up to America to "improve" it. Of more direct sf interest is Poore's second novel, Reincarnation Blues (2017), in which fantasy, horror and sf jostle Equipoisally, with sf sequences in particular – some set on a ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...