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Friday 2 June 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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Kelly, Frank K
(1914-2010) US journalist and author of considerable nonfiction, including studies in American contemporary history with Cornelius Ryan (1920-1974). He began to publish sf with "The Light Bender" for Wonder Stories in June 1931, and rapidly became known for Space-Opera tales of some bleakness, with a tendency toward Disaster, though some of his adventures featuring travel through various ...
Bérard, Sylvie
(1965- ) Canadian academic and author who began to publish work of interest in the fields of the fantastic with "Autour de l'elfe" ["Around the Elf"] for Nouvelles fraîches #3 in 1987, and who has published about forty stories since. Her first novel, Elle meurt à la fin ["She Died at the End"] (1993) with Brigitte Caron, is nonfantastic; her second, Terre des Autres (2002 Solaris #143 as "La Guerre sans temps" ["War Without ...
Hotston, Stewart
(? - ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Haecceity" in La Femme (anth 2014) edited by Ian Whates. His sf series, the Oligarchy sequence beginning with A Family War (2016), is set in a high-Technology Dystopian fairly-distant Near Future ruled by an arrogant ...
Massively Multiplayer Online Game
Term used to describe a type of Videogame in which large numbers of players interact with each other in a persistent Online World. Various forms exist, including Space Sims, exemplified by EVE Online (2003), and First Person Shooters, such as the science-fictional PlanetSide (2003 Verant Interactive, Win) ...
Hughes, Zach
Working name for much of his sf of US author Hugh Zachary (1928-2016), who also used various other pseudonyms for sf, including Evan Innes, Peter Kanto, Pablo Kane and Marcus Van Heller; he used his real name for other work from 1961 on, at least 100 titles in all. His novels in the sf field were expertly devised and readable and frequently surprisingly dark in their implications. The Book of Rack the Healer (July/August-September/October 1972 If; 1973) and ...
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 ...