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Friday 13 September 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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Snedeker, Caroline Dale
(1871-1956) US author, initially of children's books, some of them depicting life in versions of New Harmony, the town of her birth being named after the communitarian Utopia New Harmony created by her grandfather Robert Owen (1771-1858). Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community (1917) is a fictionalized (and fantasticated) biography of an experimental Scientist and early resident of New Harmony, Indiana, which had ...
Chayefsky, Paddy
Working name of US playwright and author Sidney Aaron Chayefsky (1923-1981), most famous for his work as a Television dramatist; Marty (produced 1953) marks for many a culmination (and a sign of the passing) of the Golden Age of US television drama. The Tenth Man (first performed 1959; 1960) is a Dybbuk fantasy based on The Dybbuk (1920) by S Ansky (1863-1920). His sf novel, Altered States (1978) (see ...
McGuire, Seanan
(1978- ) US filker (see Filk), Internet presence and prolific author, who also writes as by A Deborah Baker and Mira Grant; she began publishing work of genre interest with "Lost" in Ravens in the Library: Magic in the Bard's Name (anth 2009) edited by SatyrPhil Brucato and Sandra Buskirk, and became prominent very quickly, winning the John W Campbell Award for best new writer in 2010. She ...
Antigravity
The idea of somehow counteracting Gravity is one of the great sf dreams: it is gravity that kept us earthbound for so long, and even now the energy expenditure required to escape the gravity well of Earth or any other massive celestial body is the main factor that makes Space Flight so difficult and expensive. The theme of antigravity appeared early in sf. In the Proto SF era, Francis Godwin's ...
Slick
A term that emerged in the 1930s, originally as "slick-paper magazine" to distinguish what many regarded as the quality magazines from the Pulps. The slicks were also known as the "heavies" or "glossies", because they were printed on coated stock to allow better reproduction of photographs, as much for advertisements as for the editorial content, which made each individual issue considerably heavier than a pulp. The "glossies" had been around for far longer than the ...
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 ...