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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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Pratchett, Terry
(1948-2015) UK author who began publishing with "The Hades Business" in Science Fantasy in 1963, collected with other (mostly early) stories as A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction (coll 2012). For many years he was in full-time employment, as a journalist until 1980 – contributing many short stories to the Bucks Free Press "Children's Circle" section under the pseudonym "Uncle Jim" – and as a publicity ...
Satellite, The
UK fanzine published from Liverpool, England, by John F Burke (Jonathan Burke) and David McIlwain (Charles Eric Maine). UK quarto (10 x 8 in), hectographed to #3 (December 1938) and duplicated thereafter. Seventeen issues, October 1938 to August 1940. Later issues credit Burke as principal editor and McIlwain as associate or art editor. / Launched as the "official organ of the Liverpool S.F.A." (Science Fiction ...
Farnsworth, Christopher
(1971- ) US screenwriter and author who came to wide notice with the President's Vampire sequence beginning with Blood Oath (2010), which features episodes from the life and work of Nathaniel Cade, a Vampire who, on being captured in 1867, is pardoned by President Ulysses S Grant on condition that he swear to use his powers on behalf of American Presidents from that time onward. The first tale deals with his more or less ...
King, Maggie Shen
(? - ) Taiwan-born author, in USA from the age of sixteen, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Ball and Chain" in Asimov's for February 2014. This story is essentially the first chapter of her first novel, An Excess Male (2017), set in a Near Future Dystopian China, whose genuine historical One-Child attempts to control ...
Swigart, Rob
Working name of US author and academic Eugene Robison Swigart (1941- ), whose novels, from Little America (1977) on, have been Fabulations composed in a flamboyantly brisk gonzo style through which, like Kurt Vonnegut, comprise a series of deadpan riffs on the extremities of America. Though not making up a series, his first four novels – Little America (1977), ...
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. ...