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Friday 20 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Alexander, Alma
Pseudonym of Yugoslavian-born author Alma Alexander Hromic Deckert (1963- ), whose childhood was spent in Africa, her early adulthood in New Zealand, and who is currently in USA; active as an author of nonfantastic work from around 1995, and since that date mostly as an author of fantasy. Her first sequences, including the Changer of Days series, beginning with Changer of Days, Volume One (2001; vt The Hidden Queen 2005), and the ...
Lawson, Alfred William
(1869-1954) US baseball player (a pitcher very briefly in the National Baseball League in 1890), opponent of the Ku Klux Klan (he attempted to break the colour bar in professional baseball), aviator and businessman (founder of Lawson Aircraft Company in 1919), inventor (mainly of the Pseudoscience Lawsonomy, a unified field principle that explains physics in terms of "zig-zag and swirl" and other principles: "Suction is the female of movement and Pressure is ...
Ma, Ling
(1983- ) Chinese-born academic and author, in US from childhood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Yeti Lovemaking" in Unstuck #2 for 2012, which was published with other variously surreal gonzo Satires as Bliss Montage (coll 2022); its description of lovemaking with a yeti dressed as a human male (see Apes as Human) is chasteningly sharp; "bliss montage" is a term in film ...
O'Duffy, Eimar
(1893-1935) Irish dentist, political economist and author whose The Wasted Island (1919), though couched in apocalyptic tones, deals strictly with the historical Ireland during the years leading up to the Easter Uprising of 1916; Bricriu's Feast: A Comedy in Three Acts with an Epilogue (1919 chap), a play, is fantasy. O'Duffy moved to England in 1926, where he composed his best-known work, the mock-epic-Irish Cuanduine sequence comprising ...
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 ...