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Friday 20 May 2022
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 18 May 2022
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Dunne, Thomas L
(1946- ) US author whose first novel, The Scourge (1978), is a medical sf thriller (see Medicine) in which a cancer plague causes widespread Disaster, a Pandemic which devastates much of the western world. [JC]
Wuxia
"Martial Heroes". A shorthand term often employed in writings on Chinese fiction and film, denoting the adventures of martial artists. Originally a calque of the Japanese term bukyō, introduced in the adventure novels of Shunrō Oshikawa around 1902, the term was co-opted by a community of authors scrambling to address the Matter of China in troubled modern times. [For Matter see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below.] China during the Qing era (1644-1911) was ruled by a ...
d'Arch Smith, Timothy
(1936- ) UK bibliographer, antiquarian bookseller, and author, whose wit and scholarly predilections – Montague Summers (see Bibliographies), Aleister Crowley, rock 'n' roll, and cricket (see Games and Sports) – inform his contribution to the genre. Alembic (1992) is a work of Hard SF that joins alchemy, rock 'n' roll (see Music), sex magic (see Magic), and a sharp Satire of the workings of British government departments. In the basement laboratories and drab ...
Drury, Allen
(1918-1998) US author of the Advise and Consent sequence of novels depicting US political (see Politics) life from a point roughly similar to real-life 1960 and growing into a full-fledged though ultimately short-winded Future History. The bent is conservatively anti-communist, and the Satirical effects are often telling, though sometimes tendentious. The series comprises Advise and Consent (1959), which won a Pulitzer Prize, A Shade of Difference (1962), Capable of Honor (1966) and Preserve ...
Wesso, H W
Working name of German-born American artist Hans Waldemar Wessolowski (1894-1948), sometimes credited solely as Wesso. He completed his education at the Berlin Royal Academy before moving to America in 1914, and was soon doing covers and interior illustrations for a variety of Pulp magazines. He began his sf career by doing a few covers for Amazing Stories and Amazing Stories Quarterly after Hugo Gernsback's departure in 1929, but he was best known for painting all of the covers for the issues ...
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, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. Criticized at first for its failure to annotate its findings – so that, for instance, pseudonyms used for sf could not be ...