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Sunday 22 May 2022
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 20 May 2022
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Fast, Howard
(1914-2003) US author best known for his work outside the sf field: historical novels under his own name, and detective novels and thrillers as by E V Cunningham. The Unvanquished (1942) and Spartacus (1951), both signed with his own name, remain perhaps his most familiar titles. He began publishing sf with "Wrath of the Purple" for Amazing in October 1932, about a blob (see Biology) whose growth is unstoppable (for a while), but did not actively produce sf until the later 1950s, when he ...
Munsey's Magazine
US magazine published by Frank A Munsey and edited initially by John Kendrick Bangs for only six months and then by Richard H Titherington. It began on 2 February 1889 as Munsey's Weekly, but became a monthly as Munsey's Magazine from October 1891-October 1929, when it merged with Argosy All-Story Weekly (see The Argosy) to form two magazines, Argosy Weekly and All-Story Love Tales. It was Munsey's that revolutionized the popular magazine when, in October 1893, Munsey slashed the price from ...
Kadrey, Richard
(1957- ) US rock musician, author and illustrator; he did the cover for Interzone #9 (Autumn 1984) and the vigorous though somewhat derivative collage illustrations for Dream Protocols (coll 1992 chap) by sf poet Lee Ballentine (1954- ); he has also contributed articles to Science Fiction Eye and Whole Earth Review. He began to publish sf with "The Fire Catcher" for Interzone, Summer 1985. Not wholly assimilated influences including Cyberpunk as a ...
Redal, Javier
Working name of Spanish author Francisco Javier Redal (1952-2006), who was by profession a high school science teacher. He published four novels and two novellas in collaboration with Juan Miguel Aguilera plus a dozen solo short stories; they met in 1977, as Aguilera was a student in the same high school where he worked, and published together a school sf Fanzine entitled Módulo ["Module"]. Redal was a prolific contributor to Nueva Dimensión magazine and other sf fanzines, for ...
Higgins, Peter
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Original Word for Rain" in Zahir for Spring 2006, a fantasy. Of some sf interest is Wolfhound Century (2013), a Near Future Urban Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] which begins the projected Vissarion Lom sequence. Lom, a noirish police inspector, travels to his country's capital – which is much like Moscow – in order to track down insurgents. He ...
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 ...