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Tuesday 21 March 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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Wallace, King
(? -? ) US author whose sf novel, The Next War: A Prediction (1892), not untypically for its time and place of origin, plays on white racial fears of Black uprisings in the Near Future (see Race in SF). In this case, after failing to Poison all American whites, the Blacks lose the ensuing rebellion and disperse into the hinterlands, where they become ...
Chown, Marcus
(1959- ) UK author, currently "cosmology consultant" for New Scientist; his sf novels, both in collaboration with John Gribbin, are Double Planet (November 1984 Analog by John Gribbin solo; exp 1988), a competent Hard-SF tale about a conflict of political interests over a Comet which may or may not be ...
Shteyngart, Gary
(1972- ) Russian-born author, in US since 1979; his birth-name, which he changed at an early age, was Igor Shteyngart. The extravagance of his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002), with its confabulatory rendering of an imaginary Prague (here named Prava), slips uneasily into hints of a fuller Fantastika. Of his later works two are of more direct sf interest: Absurdistan (2006) is a gonzo ...
Scarlet – The Film Magazine
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on middle-grade paper. Publisher and editor: Harry Long. Ten numbered, undated issues, 2008 to 2013. Publication schedule irregular. / This follow-up to Scarlet Street magazine was founded by former staff member Long – in company with others connected to the previous title – as a Semiprozine which focused more closely on classic ...
Webzine
Webzine has become an almost universal term for an Online Magazine, the earliest reference to it according to the Oxford English Dictionary being in December 1994. In this encyclopedia we use the term Online Magazine to cover all digital magazines, which include both webzines and E-Zines, the distinction being that a webzine is only accessible via a website. A few digital magazines ...
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 ...