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Saturday 23 September 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 18 September 2023
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Burnaby, Fred
(1842-1885) UK soldier, traveller and author, almost exclusively of travel books retailing his own exploits in Turkey, Russia and elsewhere; his sf novel, Our Radicals: A Tale of Love and Politics (1886 2vols), was posthumous. He was co-founder of the magazine Vanity Fair, and his life and opinions combined broad hints of Decadence and a flamboyant high toryism. All of this is reflected in his one work of fiction, a ...
Doc Weir Award
Award for services to Fandom, voted on and presented annually at the UK Eastercon since 1963 in memory of the then recently deceased fan Arthur Rose "Doc" Weir (? -1961) and his activities. The award takes the form of a silver cup engraved with the names of past winners; all available space on the cup itself having been used, winners are now commemorated on silver plates attached to its storage ...
Sandford, John
Pseudonym of US journalist and author John Roswell Camp (1944- ), best known for his nonfantastic work, in particular the Prey series of detective thrillers [not listed below]; he won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1986. He is of initial sf interest for the Young Adult Near Future Singular Menace sequence written in collaboration with his wife (since 2013) Michele ...
Harrison, Payne
(1948- ) US journalist and author of Technothrillers, two of which edge into sf: Storming Intrepid (1989), which extrapolates a Near Future USSR/USA conflict based on a development of Star Wars (events soon outdated the tale); and Thunder of Erebus (1991), also set in the Near Future, during a peril-inducing expedition to drill deep into the ...
Three Stooges Films
The Three Stooges were a US comedy team who debuted in vaudeville (music-hall) as part of Ted Healy and His Stooges in 1922 and went on to make 190 or more short films for Columbia Pictures, characterized like their stage act by often violent and abusive farce and slapstick. Long-running members were Larry Fine (1902-1975) and Moe Howard (1897-1975), with the third Stooge role variously taken by Howard's brothers Shemp Howard (1895-1955) and Jerome "Curly" Howard (1903-1952), by Joe Besser ...
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 ...