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Saturday 8 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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Smith, L Neil
(1946-2021) US author, ex-police reserve officer, gunsmith and former state candidate for the US Libertarian Party, who began publishing sf with "Grimm's Law" for Stellar 5 (anth 1980) edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey. He remains best known for the North American Confederacy sequence, set in a parallel universe (see Parallel Worlds) in which a libertarian version of ...
Mailer, Norman
(1923-2007) US public figure, controversialist and author at the centre of American intellectual life for many decades after the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), though his influence waned in his last years. Mailer's work was never identified with genre fiction, but all of his later fiction contain elements of Fantasy, with frequent evocations of an imaginative world containing spirits, paranormal phenomena and magical ...
Howell, George Rogers
(1833-1899) US educationist, editor and author of Noah's Log Book: How Two Americans Blasted the Ice on Mt Ararat and Found Noah's Ark and Some Curious Relics (coll 1898), the title tale describing the discovery of, and transcribing, Noah's journal. To this is appended "The Open Polar Sea: Its Discovery by an Unknown New Yorker, Believed to be From the East End of Long Island", whose narrator has travelled by Balloon to a clement ...
Lord, Gabrielle
(1946- ) Australian author, mostly of thrillers, who has been publishing novels since 1980. Her fourth, Salt (1990), is a routine Post-Holocaust novel set in Australia in 2075 CE suffering from devastating Climate Change, the holocaust having been the product of Overpopulation, Pollution and dreadful damage to the ...
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 ...