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Friday 13 September 2024
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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Banks, Raymond E
(1918-1996) US businessman who began writing with the fantasy story "The Sad Room" for Esquire in November 1946, billed as that Slick magazine's "discovery of the month"; he began again with "Never Trust an Intellectual" for Dynamic Science Fiction in June 1953, publishing at least 30 additional stories in the next decade. His novels are Sex-dominated ...
Hard SF
Item of sf Terminology coined by P Schuyler Miller in Astounding (November 1957) and since then widely used by sf Fandom and readers; it has sometimes overlapped in meaning with "hardcore sf", often used in the 1960s and 1970s to mean the kind of sf that repeats the themes and (to a degree) the style of the Genre SF written during the so-called ...
Fox-Davies, A C
(1871-1928) UK author, a specialist in heraldry (which he took very seriously), in whose sf novel, The Sex Triumphant (1909), the rise of women (see Feminism; Women in SF) in the Near Future is seen as disastrous. [JC]
Sheers, Owen
(1974- ) Fiji-born poet and author, in Wales from early childhood; his Hitler Wins tale, Resistance (2007), filmed as Resistance (2011), depicts life in a hidden part of Wales near Abergavenny after the Allies' failure of D-Day has been followed by a German Invasion of England. The tale focuses on both the men who leave to join a secret resistance movement and upon the women they ...
Lucas, John
(1966- ) UK author of Faster Than Life (2002), a spoof Space Opera with clear affinities to the work of Douglas Adams. [JC]
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 ...