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Thursday 5 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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Saki
Pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), Burma-born UK author and journalist in England from infancy; noted for the acerbic wit and grace of his fiction, almost all of it in short forms. In the late 1890s he began writing contemporary political sketches, inspired and illustrated by F Carruthers Gould, for The Westminster Gazette as by Saki, the name of the "Minister of Wine" in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, publishing these ...
Hill, Carol
(1942- ) US author whose first novel, Jeremiah 8:20 (1970), is a raucous Fabulation about the Apocalypse, whose protagonist becomes (or does not become) Master of the Universe. Her second, Let's Fall in Love (1974), ornately spoofs Sex, pornography and Politics in a vaguely fantastic 1970s milieu. The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer (1985; vt ...
Smith, George H
(1922-1996) US author of much popular fiction and considerable sf, under his own name and several pseudonyms including books as by Ross Camra, Jan Hudson, Jerry Jason, Jan Smith, George Hudson Smith, Diana Summers (not sf), Hal Stryker, Roy Warren and – mostly with his wife M Jane Deer – M J Deer. He began publishing sf with "The Last Spring" for Startling Stories in 1953, and became very active after about 1960, releasing his first sf novels ...
Carriger, Gail
Pseudonym of US archaeologist and author Tofa Borregaard (1976- ), who published some early short fiction under her real name, beginning with "A Kind of Malice" in Space and Time for 1999. As Carriger, she has focused almost exclusively on the Parasol Protectorate sequence – the central volumes of which are Soulless (2009), Changeless (2010), Blameless (2010), Heartless ...
Bentley, Norman S
(1867-? ) US lawyer and author whose Future War novel Armada of the Air (1937) counts as an extremely early Hitler Wins tale, though the emphasis here is more on the governmental fanaticism that has disarmed Great Britain by 1946 than on the four dictators (one of them Hitler by clear inference) who wage war by air (the armada boasts thousands of planes) on their hapless foe. [JC]
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 ...