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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 ...
Shaara, Michael
(1928-1988) US author who began publishing sf with "All the Way Back" for Astounding in July 1952, the first of twenty-one stories he released in the 1950s, followed by a gap of more than two decades before he returned briefly to the form. Soldier Boy (coll 1982) assembles tales from both periods of his sf work, in which a slightly distanced diction is at times absorbingly applied to straightforward genre plots involving strange planets and ...
Portnoy, Howard N
(1946- ) US author and teacher whose Hot Rain (1977) seems to start off as a Horror fantasy about apparently supernatural bolts of lightning. Eventually, however, a ludicrous pseudoscientific explanation (see Scientific Errors) is found in a secret military project. [JC] see also: Weather Control. /
Williams, F P
(1848-1930) US author of Hallie Marshall: A True Daughter of the South (1900), an Alternate History in which the South has won the American Civil War after its victory at Gettysburg; as witnessed by a visitor from our world, the "Southland", which retains slavery, continues to flourish in 1900. Blacks, here normally called darkies, are more than content (see Race in SF). The visitor falls in love with Hallie ...
Andre-Driussi, Michael
(1962- ) US scholar and author best known for his elucidative bibliographical, lexicographical and archaeological investigations into the decipherment of the more difficult texts of Gene Wolfe. His illuminating guide to Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun sequence in Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle (1994; exp 2008) – see Checklist below for ancillary pamphlets later integrated into the ...
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 ...