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Monday 7 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 ...
Bermúdez Castillo, Gabriel
(1934-2019) Spanish solicitor and author, a pioneer in introducing local references, themes and characters into Spanish science fiction, highly influenced by Anglo-Saxon sf in the fifties and sixties. He published nine novels, three collections and more than twenty short stories and novellas, some considered classics of Spanish sf and repeatedly reprinted. He also used the pseudonym Gael Benjamín. / Bermúdez Castillo began writing stories in ...
Dennis, Nigel
(1912-1989) UK author whose first novel, Chalk and Cheese: A Co-Educational School Novel (1934) as by Richard Vaughan, is a Satire lying just short of the fantastic; his third novel, Cards of Identity (1955), is a Fabulation about a post-World War Two England whose citizens are so bereft of security that any Identity can be imposed on anyone (see also ...
Inner Space
In sf Terminology, an antonym to "outer space". The term was probably first used in the sf field by Robert Bloch in a speech at the 1948 Worldcon, but was not widely disseminated at that time. However, in "They Come from Inner Space" (5 December 1953 The New Statesman) – an essay he later included in Thoughts in the Wilderness (coll 1957) – J B ...
Tales of the Unanticipated
US letter-size Semiprozine, known affectionately as ToTU, which was originally published by the Minnesota Science Fiction Society from Fall 1986, but became an independent magazine from issue #24 (July 2003). It has been edited throughout by Eric M Heideman. For the first eighteen issues it appeared at the rate of roughly three issues every two years; the schedule became annual from August 1998, switching to a slightly smaller, near-standard format (9.75 x ...
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 ...