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Saturday 9 November 2024
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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Hildebrandt, The Brothers
Working name for the team of American artists Gregory J Hildebrandt (1939-2024) and Timothy Mark Allen Hildebrandt (1939-2006), identical twin brothers, although they also worked separately using the working names Greg Hildebrandt and Tim Hildebrandt. They will forever be regarded primarily as the definitive illustrators of J R R Tolkien because of the famous Tolkien calendars that featured their paintings of his characters; oddly enough, except for one 1975 ...
Jennison, John W
(1911-1980) UK author, one of several who became active as mass-producers of genre fiction for UK paperback houses and who remained reticent about personal details during their careers. From about 1945 to the year in which it is thought he may have died, Jennison seems to have written over 100 novels under at least forty pseudonyms, mostly thrillers and Westerns; he began to publish routine but occasionally engaging sf with two novels as Edgar Rees Kennedy, ...
Desart, The Earl of
Title of UK author William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe (1845-1898), styled Viscount Castlecuffe until he assumed the earldom at the age of 20 in 1865. He signed all his books "The Earl of Desart"; several of the stories assembled as Love and Pride on an Iceberg and Other Stories (coll 1887) are sf, at least two of them anticipating with comic apprehension a Near Future in which women are emancipated (his widow became the first woman Senator in the Irish ...
Haldeman, Joe
(1943- ) US author who took a BS in physics and astronomy before serving as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1968-1969), where he was severely wounded, earning a Purple Heart; later, in 1975, he took an MFA. This range of degrees was an early demonstration of the range of interests that have shaped the Hard SF with which he has sometimes been identified; his experiences in Vietnam have in fact marked everything he has written, including his first ...
Levin, Adam
(circa 1976- ) US author, active from around 2000, whose first novel, The Instructions (2010), set in a private school for unmanageable children in Chicago, follows its precocious gonzo protagonist through over-the-top disquisitions and – the tale here verges on the fantastic – something like a revolution, with him as Messiah. Bubblegum (2020), is an Alternate History tale set in an ...
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 ...