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Tuesday 14 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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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Duff, Charles
(1894-1966) Irish translator and author who served as a press officer in World War One; his Scientific-Romance drama, Mind Products Limited: A Melodrama of the Future in Three Acts and an Epilogue (1932 Netherlands), though breezily deprecatory of the 1960 world it depicts, introduces an inventive range of extrapolatory material, including mind control (and X-ray vision) through ...
Nedram
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ), whose surname might plausibly be Marden, of John Sagur (1921), a Utopia in which the eponymous inventor of a new Power Source becomes dictator of the world and brings peace. [JC]
Villains
The division of people into simple archetypes of good and bad, Heroes and villains, has always been stronger in popular literature than in more serious fiction; indeed, the essence of the serious novel of character has ever been to explore the shades of grey between the moral absolutes of black and white. Thus sf's villains are mainly associated with Pulp-magazine sf, not just in the post-1926 specialist sf magazines but in the pulp magazines ...
Melton, Henry
(1949- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "We Hold These Rights ..." in Stellar #3 (anth 1977) edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey; his loose Small Towns, Big Ideas sequence for the Young Adult market, beginning with Emperor Dad (2007), tends to feature young protagonists who flummox the big world outside with the aid of ...
King, Reed
Pseudonym of unidentified US author (? - ) whose only publication under this name, FKA USA (2019), is a gonzo distant Near Future tale set in a balkanized America and describing a road-trip from what was once Missouri, but is now Crunch, United Colonies, to California. In 2085, all the Climate-Change and Ecological ...
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 ...