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Monday 7 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Lees, Robert James
(1849-1931) UK psychic, most famous for being the subject of a Jack the Ripper hoax, when a newspaper declared that he had pointed out a physician as the murderer. Of some sf interest is The Car of Phoebus (1903), which incorporates a Lost Race into a story involving Reincarnation; his remaining works lie outside the range of sf. [JC]
Robbins, David
(1950- ) US author, prolific in several genres under various names, his first novel, The Wereling (1983), being horror; perhaps best known for the nonfantastic Wilderness sequence of Westerns as by David Thompson. He is of greatest sf interest for the Endworld Post-Holocaust Survivalist sequence, which begins with ...
Adorno, Juan Nepomuceno
(1807-circa 1880) Mexican engineer, inventor and philosopher. He combined his fields of knowledge to write a short story – included in a long nonfiction work as described below – in which he reflected on the influence of Enlightenment philosophy, Utopian socialism, mainly from the writings of Charles Fourier and, to a lesser extent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Romanticism. Adorno lived in Europe for two periods of his ...
McConnochie, Mardi
(1971- ) Australian author, partner of James Bradley; her first novel Coldwater (2001), written for adults, is nonfantastic, as is The Snow Queen (2004); she has also written fantasy for relatively young readers, She is of sf interest for the Young Adult Quest of the Sunfish sequence beginning with Escape to the Moon Islands (2017; vt ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...