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Friday 20 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.
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Muirden, James
(1942- ) UK author, most of whose works are nonfiction popularizing Astronomy; he also published the two-volume Eric Kendall series of Young Adult sf tales comprising Space Intruder (1965) and The Moon-Winners (1965). Young Eric, after halting a rogue planet from striking Earth in the first volume, again must fight the obduracy of the British defense establishment in the second after responding to an emergency, as the Americans, who seem to have been first to reach the ...
Mauclair, Camille
(1872-1945) French poet, controversialist and author, notable in World War One for deploring German excesses and in World War Two for expressing anti-Semitic views in support of the Nazi occupation of France. Before the turn of the century, he had gained some fame as a Symbolist poet, and critical advocate of literary experimentation short of Modernism; he later attacked most twentieth-century because of its (as he periphrastically put it) Jewish roots. He is of some sf interest for the ...
Timeslip
Time Travel need not employ the specific technological focus of a Time Machine. Rather than deal with a machine's theory and construction, or such consequences of its (or a Time Gate's) repeated use as Time Paradoxes, many authors prefer to stipulate a "natural", usually one-off, accident that effects whatever time-transfer the story requires. In this encyclopedia's Terminology, the device is referred to as a timeslip. It is popular – especially in fantasy – for its narrative ...
Prucher, Jeff
(1971- ) US freelance lexicographer best known for Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (2007), the first historical dictionary of words originating in sf, plus citations and bibliographic information. Coverage includes not only the many Genre SF neologisms but critical Terminology and Fan Language. This pioneering reference book won the 2008 Hugo for Best Related Work. Prior research was usefully made public as the Oxford English Dictionary Science ...
Harbinger
Australian sf Semiprozine which could claim at the time to be the only one in Queensland. It was produced by Erika Lacey of Woodbridge, Queensland with the assistance of Jason Kennedy, with Vincent Watego as art editor and, from issue #2, Robert N Stephenson (see Altair) providing the layout. It ran for four quarterly issues dated January to September 1999, though the first issue was distributed from November 1998. It was a slim, digest-size, side-stapled format into which were squeezed seven ...
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 ...