SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 17 January 2022
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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Lee, Pamela
(1949- ) American artist. After growing up on the campus of the University of Iowa, Lee moved with her family to Arizona when she was twelve; upon graduating from the University of Arizona in 1970, she moved to California to work in advertising before an assignment obtained through artist William K Hartmann introduced her to space art, which quickly became her specialty. One typical example of her work in this area would be her cover for the art book she produced with ...
Homer
(circa 800 BCE-circa 700 BCE) The most famous of early Greek poets, whether or not one or more individuals, or a guild of homers who recited poetry, and whose birth and death dates remain speculative; his or their birth and death may have occurred between the dates given above. Samuel Butler, in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), argued for female authorship of the Odyssey, and Robert Graves, in his novel Homer's Daughter (1955), argued that a woman wrote both epics. Homer is generally ...
Badger, Joseph E, Jr
(1848-1909) US author who began contributing Dime Novels to journals like the New York Weekly and other Beadle & Adams publications from as early as 1870, mostly under his own name or as Harry Hazard; in his Young Adult Lost Race novel, The Lost City (1898), the young protagonist and his professor mentor are carried by Airship in a storm to the Olympic Mountains in the state of Washington, where they encounter a lost Aztec civilization. Badger committed suicide in the failing pool hall of ...
Optimism and Pessimism
In the most simplistic version of the History of SF, sf was always (and rightly) an optimistic literature until the New Wave came along in the 1960s and spoiled everything. This was at best a very partial truth, being only remotely applicable to Genre SF and not at all to Mainstream sf. / In the mainstream, not even the work of individual authors could be categorized as simply either optimistic or pessimistic. Both Jules Verne and H G Wells took a darker view of the future as they became ...
Gorst, Harold E
(1868-1950) UK journalist, editor and author, of whose ten or more works of fiction two are sf: Without Bloodshed: A Probability of the Twentieth Century (1897), a Satire set in a Near Future UK whose socialist government has been subverted by American millionaires for their own advantage; and Sketches of the Future (coll 1898), which contains several further satires, always from a politically and culturally conservative point of view (Feminism, for instance, is guyed). [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 ...