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Monday 5 June 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.
Site updated on 3 June 2023
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Thompson, Harriet Alfarata
(1871-1922) US author of Idealia: A Utopia Dream; Or, Resthaven (1922 chap), whose protagonist visits a Utopian community for the elderly and the indigent whose features are so exceptionally humane that this domestic Pastoral could readily be understood as occupying an Alternate World. [JC]
Dime-Novel SF
Dime-novel sf, which was almost wholly boys' fiction, appeared in two media: serially in such Boys' Papers as Golden Hours, Happy Days, The Boys of New York and Young Men of America, or as complete stories in series publications like The Wide Awake Weekly, The Boy's Star Library, New York Five Cent Library, the Frank Reade Library and The Nugget Library. The most ...
Heine, William C
(1919-1991) Canadian journalist, editor-in-chief 1967-1984 of The London Free Press (London, Ontario), and author in whose Near-Future novel The Last Canadian (1974; vt Death Wind 1976; vt The Last American 1986) the survivor of a devastating Pandemic flees northwards into ice and snow; it was later filmed, under yet another title, as The Patriot (1998). [JC]
Friswell, Hain
(1825-1878) UK journalist and author, active from about 1851 in several genres. Blackwood's Comic Zadkiel: An Almanac at Once Prophetical and Profitable [for full title see Checklist] (coll 1855) is a spoof almanac in which the Predictions of its presenter/protagonist Zadkiel are dramatized, sometimes in sf form, including "'Grand Nephew Tom's Cabin,' An Extract From a Sequel Some Sixty Years After the Date of Mrs. Stowe's Volume", a ...
Cook, William Wallace
(1867-1933) US newspaper reporter and author, sometimes as by John Milton Edwards, under which name he published The Fiction Factory [for subtitle see Checklist] (1912), a detailed account of his early career in magazine publishing; most of his many stories appeared after the turn of the century in such magazines as The Argosy, some of them only reaching book form after a decade or so, in a stapled format reminiscent of ...
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. ...