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Wednesday 4 December 2024
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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Lewis, Wyndham
(1882-1957) US- or Canadian-born painter and author, primarily in the UK from 1893 (the story of his birth on an American yacht in Canadian waters has been challenged), serving in World War One first as a bombardier, then as a war artist. For the first part of his career, beginning around 1900, he was primarily active as a painter; he is best known in this capacity as a member of the Camden Town Group and the instigator of Vorticism in 1914 – which he ...
Arnyvelde, André
Pseudonym of French journalist, playwright and author André Lévy (1881-1942), his nom de plume being an anagram; in active service during World War One, deported as a Jew to a concentration camp and murdered during World War Two. His works of interest as examples of early twentieth century Fantastika convey their visions of Utopia through an unusually ...
Altruism
Everyone is familiar with C P Snow's 1959 lecture on "The Two Cultures", incorporated into Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), wherein he expressed alarm over the perceived separation of the communities of the sciences and the humanities; but few have noted his stated reason for the called-for reconciliation of the two divided communities: the need to address the growing divide between the rich nations and the poor nations of the ...
Newman, Bernard
(1897-1968) UK civil servant and author who served in the trenches during World War One; most of his output consisted of espionage thrillers (some as by Don Betteridge) and detective mysteries, the two genres being perhaps most successfully combined in Maginot Line Murder (1939). The entertainment value of his sf is somewhat limited, as he used the form primarily to provide platforms for extended right-wing arguments about ...
Silicon Dreams
Videogame series (from 1983). Level 9 Computing (L9). / The Silicon Dreams trilogy is a series of text-based science fiction Adventures. The first game, Snowball (1983 L9, Atari8, C64, Spectrum; 1984 Amstrad, MSX) designed by Mike Austin, Nick Austin, Pete Austin, is set aboard a slower than light colony starship (the "Snowball 9") approaching its destination in the solar system of 40 Eridani A. The ship ...
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 ...