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Tuesday 8 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Benét, Stephen Vincent
(1898-1943) US author, active from before 1915, very briefly involved in World War One until his myopia was discovered; brother of William Rose Benét. He was initially most noted for his moderately copious Poetry, including an Arabian fantasy, The Drug-Shop; Or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (1917 chap). The earliest examples of poems with direct sf interest are probably "Winged ...
Broom Lynne, James
(1916-1995) UK painter, designer, illustrator, teacher and author, sometimes using the original hyphenated form of his surname, Broom-Lynne; he also wrote as by James Quartermain. Almost all his fiction is nonfantastic, with the exception of Drag Hunt (1969), set in a Satirized Dystopian Near Future where violence is encouraged as a social pacifier, and – as in other sf extrapolations ...
Dreifuss, Kurt
(1897-1991) German-born author, in US from an early age, whose The Other Side of the Universe (1961) presents a low-key, Utopian vision of a future with little government, equal incomes, and social freedoms galore. [JC]
Flammarion, Camille
(1842-1925) French astronomer and author, author of at least seventy books, one of the first major popularizers of Astronomy; he took great delight in the flights of imagination to which his studies in Cosmology inspired him. In 1858, the year he entered the Paris Observatory as a student, he wrote an unpublished scientific romance, «Voyage extatique aux régions lunaires, correspondence d'un philosophe adolescent». ...
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 ...