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Saturday 25 June 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.
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Jemisin, N K
(1972- ) US psychologist and author, mostly fantasy, who began publishing work of genre interest with "L'Alchimista" in Scattered, Covered, Smothered (anth 2004) edited by Jason Erik Lundberg, and who is best known for her first two sequences. The Inheritance Trilogy – comprising The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010), which won a Locus Award for best first novel, The Broken Kingdoms (2010) and The Kingdom of Gods (2011) – can be understood in terms of dynastic ...
McComas, J Francis
(1911-1978) US editor and author who published a number of sf stories under his own name – including "Shock Treatment" (in 9 Tales of Space and Time, anth 1954, ed Raymond J Healy) and "Parallel" (April 1955 F&SF) – and as Webb Marlowe. He was co-editor with Raymond J Healy of the thirty-five-story Anthology Adventures in Time and Space: An Anthology of Modern Science-Fiction Stories (anth 1946; cut 1952; differently cut 1953; cut vt Selections from Adventures in Time and Space ...
Gong
Rock band, identified as French although they were founded by Australian Daevid Allen (1938-2015) and have included English and American as well as French members. Allen had been working in London in the late 1960s but, temporarily denied a visa, relocated to Paris and formed Gong with his partner, Gilli Smith (1933- ). The group's first album Magick Brother/Mystic Sister (1970) has a rather fairy, and indeed airy-fairy, vibe, inaugurating in rudimentary form the "Gong ...
Mella, John
(circa 1942-2012) US editor – founder of Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse in 1992, which he edited until his death – and author. Transformations (fixup 1975) is an Alternate-History tale about the quest for a transvestite actor, set in a nineteenth- and twentieth-century USA and Europe transfigured by Time Distortions (the narrator, WS or William Shakespeare, does not die until a movable 1916) and geography; the two continents have been arbitrarily merged, and are haunted by ...
Christopher, Adam
Working name of New Zealand-born author Adam Christopher McGechan (1978- ), in the UK from 2006, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Devil in Chains, Part One" in Pantechnicon for September 2008, soon followed by "The Devil in Chains, Part Two" (March 2009 Pantechnicon). His first novel, Empire State (2012), is a noir thriller set in a retro Alternate World or Pocket Universe version of New York, the Amnesia of whose citizens comes from the fact that the ...
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 ...