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Friday 14 February 2025
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 11 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Paterson, Isabel
(1886-1961) Canadian journalist, literary critic and author, in the US from around 1915, whose The God of the Machine (1943) originated many of the tenets of libertarianism (see Libertarian SF) whose intellectual interactions with Ayn Rand from the 1930s on were mutually influential. Of her fiction, The Road of the Gods (1930) is a Lost Race novel set in Germany 2,000 ...
Gottlieb, Hinko
(1886-1948) Croatian poet, author, editor and lawyer whose sf novel set in World War Two, The Key to the Great Gate (manuscript trans Fred Bolman and Ruth Morris from the Serbo-Croat 1947), was first composed in an Italian concentration camp (the manuscript was destroyed and had to be reconstructed later). An imprisoned Scientist, having learned how to expand and contract the Einsteinian spacetime continuum, dazzles ...
Coleman, Claire G
(1974- ) Australian author, more fully described as Wirlomin-Noongar-Australian; her first novel Terra Nullius (2017) comes close to allegory (but escapes) in its depiction of what seems to be a fantasticated rendering of the Aboriginal experience in Australia, but which turns out to be a relatively deadpan but strongly moving narrative set in the distant Near Future where the Aboriginals are in fact all that remain of the ...
Pace, Sue
(? - ) US author of The Last Oasis (1993), a Young Adult tale set in a Near Future world that has suffered calamitous Climate Change after long decades of environmental destruction; the young protagonists flee their precarious Keep – a shopping mall in Portland, Oregon – in the direction of Idaho, where the ...
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 ...