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Friday 14 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 ...
Berman, Mitch
(1956- ) US author of the sf novel Time Capsule (1987), set in a post-World War Three America, through which two young protagonists wander, seeing and learning much; in some regions, they discover that Slavery has been reintroduced by the American army. The tale, conducted in a highly foregrounded style, is hallucinatory, simultaneously joky and earnest, often moving. Berman has also been ...
Timms, E V
(1895-1960) Australian screenwriter and author who was in active service during World War One; his books for adults are nonfantastic, but his children's fiction include two Lost Race tales: The Valley of Adventure: A Story for Boys (1926), which finds a secret enclave deep in the Australian outback to be inhabited by aborigines, who pose a threat to White Australians; and The Cities Under the Sea ...
MacAuley, Robie
(1919-1995) US author, active as a non-genre story writer from 1947 but almost certainly best known for his first novel, The Disguises of Love (1952). His second, A Secret History of Time to Come (1979), which is sf (see Mainstream Writers of SF), describes in quasi-Pastoral terms a balkanized America (see Ruined Earth) around two centuries after race conflicts ...
Sherrell, Carl
(1929-1990) US commercial artist and, later, author whose novels are essentially fantasies, with the exception of the unremarkable The Space Prodigal (1981), a Space Opera with a haunted, roaming anti-hero (see Heroes). His fantasies are the Raum sequence – Raum (1977) and Skraelings (1987), Raum being a similar anti-hero – plus Arcane (1978) and ...
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 ...