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Sunday 25 May 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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Barker, Martin
(1946-2022), UK academic and scholar of media and cultural studies at the University of the West of England, the University of Sussex and (from 2001) Aberystwyth University, where in his last years he was professor emeritus. He began to publish studies of genre relevance with A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (1984), which explored the religious and political machinations behind the titular scaremongering of 1949-1955 which led to a UK ...
Wright, Harold Bell
(1872-1944) US clergyman and enormously popular author whose only sf novel, The Devil's Highway (1932) with John Lebar, pseudonym of his son Gilbert Munger Wright (1901-1966), features a Mad Scientist and his culpable Scientist colleagues, whose Invention, a thought-control device operating with the help of a Power Source called "ethericity", suppresses ...
Thomas D Clareson Award
Instituted in 1995 and named in honour of Thomas D Clareson, the Thomas D Clareson Award for Distinguished Service is presented by the Science Fiction Research Association for outstanding service activities, specified as the promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations. Though early ...
R. E. M.
UK Semiprozine published by REM Publications, London, edited by Arthur Straker, who was also the publisher (co-publisher on issue #1 with Andrew Coates). A4 size. It saw just two issues, the first dated Spring/Summer 1991, the second undated but distributed in November 1992. In his first editorial Straker acknowledged the role that Interzone had played in re-establishing British short-fiction sf, and stated that REM would look ...
Kantner, Paul
(1941-2016) US musician, best known as one of the founders of Jefferson Airplane. During the 1970s, when his band was in temporary abeyance, Kantner recorded a sf concept album Blows Against the Empire (1970), released as by "Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship" (a usage that predated the formation of the group of that name by four years). The album concerns a group of freedom-fighters (they believe in "free minds, free bodies, free dope, ...
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 ...