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Friday 17 January 2025
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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Bennett, Alfred Gordon
(1901-1962) UK author, documentary film-maker and founder of Pharos Books, through which he published a fantasy, Whom the Gods Destroy (1946), which is set in northeast India, where the abduction of a young woman from a lamasery, so she can be raped, is punished by occult means. His sf novel The Demigods (1939) depicts a world menaced by giant ants from an Underground fastness in Africa, who derive their abilities from an ancient ...
Speller, Maureen Kincaid
Working name of UK editor and critic Maureen Speller (1959-2022) who also wrote as Speller, and as Maureen Porter and Maureen Speller Kincaid; partner of Paul Kincaid from 1986 until her death (they married in 1993). Initially as Maureen Porter, she was active since about 1980 in UK Fandom and as a reviewer and essayist, her work appearing widely in various journals including ...
Nicholas, John
(? - ) UK author of a book-length Near Future sf poem, Saturnalia in the Suburbs: A Comic Poem (1940 chap), set in 1988 after a mysterious impulse – ordained by the gods, impatient with the tediousness of British life – causes everyone to wander about the countryside naked, abandoning London to a vast conflagration. The mildness of the Satire, ...
Bakić, Asja
(1982- ) Bosnian poet, translator and author, active from around the turn of the century, initially as a poet; her first collection, Može i kaktus, samo neka bode ["It Can Be a Cactus, as Long as it Pricks"] (coll 2009), is poetry. Some of the tales assembled in Mars (coll 2015; trans Jennifer Zoble 2019), each of which constructed as a task for its protagonist to solve, are in fact set on Mars. ...
Westerfeld, Scott
(1963- ) US composer and author – married since 2001 to Justine Larbalestier – whose first sf novel, Polymorph (1997), a tale immersed in a heatedly entangled New York, features a Shapeshifter protagonist who seems to match the city, both protagonist and venue being rendered in ways that hint of his Urban Fantasies [see The ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...