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Saturday 1 April 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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Thomas, D M
(1935-2023) UK poet and author who made use of sf themes most explicitly in such early Poetry as "The Head-Rape" in New Worlds for March 1968 and the two-part "Computer 70: Dreams & Lovepoems" (March-April 1970 New Worlds), a sequence assembled with other poetry of interest in Logan Stone (coll 1970); or the later "S. F." (in The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, anth ...
MacDonald, John D
(1916-1986) US author and ex-lieutenant colonel in the US Army, known mainly for such well-written thrillers as The Brass Cupcake (1950) and the twenty-one Travis McGee novels (1964-1985), which quickly evolved from seemingly escapist tales of derring-do, with strong hints of Ecological despair about the fate of Florida, into impassioned and savagely explicit laments for that state, for the planet, and for the human race; the nonfiction ...
Todorov, Tzvetan
(1939-2017) Bulgarian literary critic, in France from 1963; he pursued his postgraduate studies in Paris under the direction of the semiotic philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Among Todorov's several books and essays on structuralist criticism, all written in French, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; trans Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre 1973; US paperback 1975 with intro by Robert ...
Cameron, Eleanor
(1912-1996) Canadian-born US author whose career was exclusively devoted to children's literature, and who received the National Book Award in 1974 for one of her finer fantasies, The Court of the Stone Children (1973). She remains perhaps best known for the sf Mushroom Planet sequence with which she began her career: The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954), Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet (1956), Mr Bass's Planetoid ...
Washburn, Mark
(1948- ) US author of The Armageddon Game: A Novel of Suspense (1977), a Cold War tale whose protagonist manufactures an atom bomb, the threatened outcome, World War Two, being narrowly averted; this title should not be confused with the entirely nonfantastic The Armageddon Game (1985) by James N Frey. The Omega Threat (1980), is set ...
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 ...