SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 28 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.
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Orban, Paul
American artist (1896-1974), born in Hungary, who often signed his work as Orban. After studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1917, he initially did illustrations for the Chicago Tribune and worked in advertising before moving to Mount Vernon, New York in 1930 to focus on providing a few covers and numerous interior illustrations for a wide range of Pulp magazines, with occasional assignments for more upscale venues like The New York Times and Reader's Digest. / The sf ...
Hammill, Peter
British composer and musician, best known as the lead singer of Van der Graaf Generator. His solo releases, most of them similar to the prog-rock complexities of his group work, have been varied and, often, rather wayward. Popular success has eluded him although he inspires great devotion in his fans. "Imperial Zeppelin", on Hammill's first solo album Fool's Mate (1971), is an unusual example of steampunk SF-pop, possibly indebted to Michael Moorcock's Edwardian fantasies. His second solo work, ...
Laidlaw, Marc
(1960- ) US Videogame writer and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Hiss of Dragon" with Gregory Benford for Omni in December 1978. He published solo stories with some frequency in the 1980s, including "400 Boys" (November 1983 Omni), whose inclusion in Bruce Sterling's Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (anth 1986) elected him to the influential Cyberpunk cohort. But his best-known short work from this period is perhaps the Delbert and Zeb ...
Farnsworth, Christopher
(1971- ) US screenwriter and author who came to wide notice with the President's Vampire sequence beginning with Blood Oath (2010), which features episodes from the life and work of Nathaniel Cade, a Vampire who, on being captured in 1867, is pardoned by President Ulysses S Grant on condition that he swear to use his powers on behalf of American Presidents from that time onward. The first tale deals with his more or less contemporary encounters with Konrad Dippel, a Baron ...
Resnick, Mike
Working name of Michael Diamond Resnick (1942-2020), US author and dog-breeder who for most of his career signed his work as given above, though his early titles were often signed as Michael D Resnick. He began his genre career with an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, The Forgotten Sea of Mars (1965 chap); his interest in Burroughs also generated material which he published in ERB-dom Magazine, and his first sequence – the Ganymede series of Planetary Romances comprising The Goddess of ...
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 ...