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Friday 2 June 2023
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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Shaara, Michael
(1928-1988) US author who began publishing sf with "All the Way Back" for Astounding in July 1952, the first of twenty-one stories he released in the 1950s, followed by a gap of more than two decades before he returned briefly to the form. Soldier Boy (coll 1982) assembles tales from both periods of his sf work, in which a slightly distanced diction is at times absorbingly applied to straightforward genre plots involving strange planets and ...
Williams, Lynda
(1958- ) Canadian author most of whose work is set in the Okal Rel Universe, intentionally created as a Shared World of future interstellar conflict between rival cultures whose roots lie in Earth's past Colonization of Other Worlds, with a touch of Medieval Futurism in its ruling Houses, princes and empires. The first-published volume ...
Harrison, T Milner
(1865-1917) Canadian entrepreneur, almost certainly in Hawaii in 1897 where a Thomas Milner Harrison was involved in a firm engaged in selling the Hagey Gold Cure in Hawaii and the South Pacific, an enterprise which dissolved in litigation in 1902. As an author, he published one Lost World tale, Modern Arms and a Feudal Throne: The Romantic Story of an Unexplored Sea (1904), which moves from Hawaii to the South Pacific, where a great storm plummets ...
Thompson, Colin
(1942- ) UK illustrator and author, in Australia from 1995; of his very numerous books, many of them for younger children, he is of sf interest for the Young Adult Future Eden sequence beginning with Future Eden: A Brief History of Next Time (1999), which is set in a severely depopulated Ruined Earth world about 200 years hence. The solitary young protagonist, who lives a hardscrabble ...
Allen, Irwin
(1916-1991) US film-maker long associated with sf subjects. He worked in radio during the 1940s; later, with the arrival of television, he created the first celebrity panel show. In 1951 he began producing films for RKO, and in 1953 won an Academy Award for The Sea Around Us, a pseudo-documentary which he wrote and directed. He then made a similar film for Warner Brothers, The Animal World (1956), which contained Dinosaur sequences animated by ...
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 ...