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Friday 13 September 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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Sabin, Edwin L
(1870-1952) US author and historian best known for his heavily researched boys' adventure novels. He began as a journalist with a penchant for poetry and his early fiction is light-hearted, almost presaging P G Wodehouse in its eccentricity. The Magic Mashie and Other Golfish Stories (coll 1902) is a volume of humorous golfing stories a few of which verge on the fantastic, such as "The Supersensitive Golf-Ball" about a golf-ball that reacts to ...
Space Adventures (Classics)
US magazine, one of the reprint Digest-size magazines published by Sol Cohen's Ultimate Publishing Company. Six issues, Winter 1970 to Summer 1971. / The title was shortened to Space Adventures after the first two issues. The numbering ran, strangely, #9-#14, picking up where Science Fiction Classics left off, and Space Adventures (Classics) would be regarded as simply a ...
Smith, Basil A
(1908-1969) UK author and Church of England clergyman; of genre interest are his five stories, unpublished during his lifetime and posthumously assembled as The Scallion Stone (coll 1980); these have been compared to the horror tales of M R James (1862-1936), with whose work he was familiar. Two feature supernatural phenomena with Horror in SF overtones. "The Scallion Stone" (August 1977 Whispers) hints at a tentacled ...
Norminton, Gregory
(1976- ) UK anthologist and author whose first novel, The Ship of Fools (2002), places an exorbitantly various and marginally fantasticated examples of Homo sapiens taken fairly directly from "The Ship of Fools" (before 1500) by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450-1516) (see Ship of Fools), where they disport dismayedly. Arts and Wonders (2004) exploits another medieval/renaissance topos, the ...
Demure One, The
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of a Future War tale in the Battle of Dorking mode about the Invasion of the UK by France, via the much-dreaded Channel Tunnel, The Battle of Boulogne: Or How Calais Became English Again: Another Version of the Channel Tunnel Affair (1882 chap). [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 ...