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Wednesday 15 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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Čapek, Josef
(1887-1945) Painter, cartoonist, author and playwright born in the former Austria-Hungary of Czech parentage, older brother of Karel Čapek. As a painter he was active from around 1900, his work soon showing Cubist influences, moving in the 1920s towards representational idioms, which he sampled variously; though he published in his own right, his pre-World War One career as a writer was mostly conducted in collaboration ...
Baker, Will
Working name of US teacher, environmentalist and author William Edwin Baker (1935-2005), who began his publishing career with Syntax in English Poetry (1967) as William E Baker, his career as a writer of fiction with Chip (1979), one of several novels deeply involved in the world of the American West, and his short career as an sf writer with Shadow Hunter (1993), a post-Disaster tale in which, after a kind of last war has ...
Hydrozagadka
["Hydro-Mystery"] Film (1971). Zespół Filmowy Plan. Directed by Andrzej Kondratiuk. Written by Andrzej Bonarski and Andrzej Kondratiuk. Cast includes Iga Cembrzyńska, Roman Kłosowski, Zdzisław Maklakiewicz, Wiesław Michnikowski and Józef Nowak. 70 minutes. Black and white. / Hydro-Mystery uses the Superhero genre as a vehicle for Satire. Shot in 1970 and released in 1971, the ...
Portal
Videogame (1986). Nexa Corporation. Designed by Rob Swigart. Platforms: Amiga, AppleII, AtariST, C64, Mac, PCBoot. / Portal was an attempt to create a "computer novel", a form that was intended to more closely resemble that of hyperfiction (see Hypertext) than that of the text Adventure. The player takes the part of an astronaut sent on a solitary mission ...
Quinet, Edgar
(1803-1875) French author, mostly of idealist nonfiction, active from the 1820s, in exile during the reign of the second Buonaparte 1851-1870. Of sf interest is Ahasuérus (portions appeared 1833 Revue des Deux Mondes; 1834; trans Brian Stableford as Ahasuerus 2013), which as not infrequently found in works of Proto SF combines divine and secular narratives in its recounting of the ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...