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Friday 18 April 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Vortex Science Fiction
US Digest-size magazine, two issues, May and October 1953, published by Specific Fiction Corp, New York; edited by Chester Whitehorn. Vortex was designed to showcase a large number of very short stories in each issue, achieving this goal in #2, but the idea did not prove popular. However, not all of the nine new writers who made their debut in the second issue were doomed to remain unknown: Marion Zimmer Bradley had ...
Hendrix, Howard V
(1959- ) US academic and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "In the Smoke" (in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Vol 2, anth 1986, ed Algis Budrys); other early work was assembled in Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 (coll 1990 chap). After an academic study of medieval and Renaissance texts that invoke visions of last things, ...
McElhiney, Gaile Churchill
(1888-1978) US author of a Lost Race novel, Into the Dawn (1945), in which a pilot discovers a hidden Island in the South Pacific housing descendants of lost Lemuria who have here created, with the aid of advances in Technology, a spiritually elevated Utopia. [JC]
Bok Geo-Il
(1946- ) South Korean author who turned to full-time writing after a business career in the early 1980s. A graduate of the College of Commerce at Seoul National University, Bok's first novel Bimyeong-eul Chajaseo ["Looking for an Epitaph"] (1987 2vols) posited a complex but well-realized Alternate History in which the politician Itō Hirobumi survives an assassination attempt in 1909, ...
Fu Manchu
Sax Rohmer's Asian Supervillain Doctor Fu Manchu (also rendered as Fu-Manchu) is a Mad Scientist, initially based in the slums of Limehouse, London, who is armed with advanced scientific Weapons and bent on world domination. In addition to his impressive scientific acumen and boundless determination, Fu Manchu is given to occasional flashes ...
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 ...