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Friday 17 January 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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Greenberg, Martin
(1918-2013) US publisher and anthologist, not to be confused with Martin H Greenberg, who was no relation. In 1948 he cofounded with David A Kyle and others Gnome Press, one of the small but important early publishers of Genre SF in hardcover format. Greenberg edited the Adventures in Science Fiction series of five anthologies for Gnome, comprising ...
Erickson, Steve
Working name of US author Stephen Michael Erickson (1950- ), active as a journalist for some years before his first novel, Days Between Stations (1985), quickly established his reputation as an author of dark, journey-haunted, surreal Fabulations about the USA and the twentieth century. Labyrinthine figurations of apocalypse dominate his grey and hyperbolic landscapes; but a powerful sense of geography, notable also in the ...
Knight, Norman L
(1895-1972) US author and pesticide chemist for the Department of Agriculture until his retirement in 1963. He was not a prolific writer, publishing only 11 stories altogether, the first of which was the serialized novella "Frontier of the Unknown" for Astounding in July and August 1937. He made his main contribution by collaborating with James Blish on A Torrent of Faces (1967). This novel – whose ...
Gorst, Harold E
(1868-1950) UK journalist, editor and author, of whose ten or more works of fiction two are sf: Without Bloodshed: A Probability of the Twentieth Century (1897), a Satire set in a Near Future UK whose socialist government has been subverted by American millionaires for their own advantage; and Sketches of the Future (coll 1898), which contains several further satires, always from a politically and culturally ...
Faldbakken, Knut
(1941- ) Norwegian author, prolific in several genres since he began his career in 1967; of sf interest is the Sweetwater sequence, comprising Uår: Aftenlandet (1974; trans Joan Tate as Twilight Country 1993) and Uår: Sweetwater (1976; trans Joan Tate as Sweetwater 1994), set in a Near Future world – Sweetwater is an ironically named near-derelict, water-short ...
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 ...