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Friday 14 February 2025
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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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Windling, Terri
(1958- ) US editor, artist and author, who occasionally publishes under the pseudonym Bellamy Bach. She grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and attended Antioch College, where she pursued her interests in art and folklore. She then moved to New York and began working in the publishing industry. She has had her greatest impact on the field as an editor, both of book series and anthologies that accompanied and abetted the burgeoning popularity of ...
Selznick, Brian
(1966- ) US illustrator and author, in earlier years almost exclusively for younger children or Young Adult markets, and whose work as a whole is too complex and multi-sourced to fit easily into any specific mode; over all, though, his art and stories, combined or separately conceived, can be seen as exercises in Fantastika. His first book, for instance, The Houdini Box (graph 1992), ...
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 ...
Cities
The city is the focal point of our civilization, and images of the city of the future bring into sharp relief the expectations and fears with which we imagine the future of civilization. Disenchantment with metropolitan life was evident even while Utopian optimism remained strong, and became remarkably exaggerated in Dystopian images of the future. The growth of the cities during the Industrial Revolution created filthy slums where ...
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 ...