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Friday 29 September 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.
Site updated on 25 September 2023
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Leigh, Lora
Pseudonym of US author of erotic romances Christine Simmons (1965- ). Of sf interest is the Feline Breeds sequence, beginning with Tempting the Beast (2003), in which a Cat-like male – part of a Near Future programme in the Genetic Engineering of elite forces – encounters a sexually aroused woman reporter (see Sex; ...
Turton, Godfrey
(1901-1985) UK author of such fantasies as The Devil's Churchyard (1970) and The Festival of Flora: A Story of Ancient and Modern Times (1972). He remains of some sf interest for There Was Once a City (1927), in which an ancient City is inundated through a Disaster whose causation is Equipoisal between supernatural hubris and natural cataclysm; and ...
Watson, Tom
(1982- ) UK author whose first novel Metronome (2022) is set in a Near Future Dystopian UK where women have lost control of their bodies (see Sex; Women in SF); the protagonists, a young couple planning to conceive without permission, have been exiled to a northern Island. The focus on these years (see ...
Sorokin, Vladimir
(1955- ) Russian artist, playwright and author, active since about 1972, though his first work to appear in English was Ochered' (1983; trans Sally Laird as The Queue 1988), a deadpan Satire on Soviet Russia; the text of this story, which is set in a gigantic unending queue, consists of nothing but lines of dialogue exchanged amongst dozens, maybe hundreds, of unidentified speakers, and so is even more stripped down ...
Relativity
Overall name for the theories of space-time Physics formulated by Albert Einstein (1869-1955): special relativity, proposed in 1905, and general relativity, proposed in 1916. Both theories, though initially controversial, have been exhaustively tested by experiment. / In special relativity it is axiomatic that there is no absolute or "privileged" frame of reference against which velocity can be measured: only the relative velocity of any given two bodies is ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...