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Wednesday 11 December 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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Lynde, Francis
(1856-1930) US author, prolific in several popular genres, including detective thrillers and Westerns, these two forms being brought together in Scientific Sprague (coll of linked stories 1912), featuring the exploits of the eponymous detective-cum-engineer, who defends a Western railroad (see Transportation) against thieves, accidents and Inventions in the hands of villains. Several of ...
Arkell, Will J
(1856-1930) US author of Napoleon Smith (1888) with A T Worden (? -? ), writing together as by A Well-Known New Yorker. Arkell, a wealthy US businessman, had bought Judge magazine in the mid-1880s (and used it as a Republican platform to attack the Democratic administration): the novel – a tame political Satire set in the Near Future – appeared from The Judge Publishing ...
Parmele, Mary Platt
(1843-1911) US popular historian and author of Ariel; Or, the Author's World (1898 chap), whose narrator – taking advantage of unexplained Psi Powers – creates a planetoid which circles Earth at a distance of 400,000 miles, apparently in geosynchronous orbit (see Scientific Errors), and which is inhabited by the Frankenstein Monster and other creatures also ...
Ng, Celeste
(1980- ) US author whose first two novels – Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017), both essentially nonfantastic – were very positively received, the second attracting attention for its astute anatomy of the disintegration of a Utopian planned community in 1990s America. Her third novel, the Near Future Our Missing Hearts ...
Time Abyss
The first recognition of deep Time – the realization of truly awesome timescales – may plausibly be dated to the effective invention of geology by James Hutton (1726-1797), whose intuition that the rocks of our planet "show no vestige of a beginning" inspired in his biographer John Playfair (1748-1819) the response that, on being faced with this insight, "The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time." Certainly deep time is one of ...
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, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...