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Friday 22 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.
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Heroes
Gilgamesh may be the first named hero in what we think of as the Western World. Like him, most heroes in the cultures of the West are passionate, often rebellious, defenders of and bringers of relief to their homelands, and until perhaps Boudicca (floruit 60-61 CE) always male. They often descended from Gods (see Gods and Demons) but are distinct from them, like Hercules; even Prometheus, the paradigm culture hero in the Western tradition, is not a ...
Harrison, M John
(1945- ) UK author and rock-climber, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Marina" for Science Fantasy #81 in February 1966 as by John Harrison; he was most closely identified in the 1960s with New Worlds, where he released his first sf story, "Baa Baa Blocksheep", in November 1968, and for which he later wrote some of the best tales using the Jerry Cornelius template, or ...
Penny, Laurie
(1986- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Making Babies" in Terraform [online] for 13 April 2015; in her sf novel, Everything Belongs to the Future (2016), is set in a Near Future Britain, most of whose inhabitants have been comprehensively immiserated by the very rich, the 1% have access to an Immortality Drug, though the protagonist ...
Lyon, E D
(1825-1891) UK soldier, Governor of Dublin District Military Prison 1854-1856; commercial photographer from 1865 in India and elsewhere; and author whose Near Future sf novel, Ireland's Dream: A Romance of the Future (1888 2vols), set in a chaotic independent Ireland; its depiction of the consequences of the end of British rule (see Politics) is savagely unfriendly to the Irish, confessing inter alia to a ...
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope
(1894-1981) US scholar and academic, in the latter role at Smith College from 1929 to 1941, and at Columbia University from 1941 until 1962. Some of her work – like Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (1946) – is indirectly useful to students of Proto SF. Of direct interest in the study of early works in the field are two books focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: ...
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 ...