SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 9 December 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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Dirda, Michael
(1948- ) US editor, journalist and author, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his journalism; as a Book World editor for the Washington Post (1978-2003) he was an influential advocate of sf as a form of literature worth serious attention, creating and editing a monthly sf column by various critics, as well as making room for individual reviews. He now writes a weekly column for the Post; his work also appears in the New York Review of Books and ...
Lindsay, Vachel
(1879-1931) US poet, the clanging visionary primitivism of whose best-known work – the poems assembled in The Congo and Other Poems (coll 1914) – may have been ingenuous; some of the poems in Going-to-the-Sun (coll 1923) are of sf interest (see Poetry), one of them being adapted by John Clute for his sf novel Appleseed (2001). His Cinema criticism – ...
Popkes, Steven
(1952- ) US author who began publishing sf with "A Capella Blues" in Asimov's for 1982. Caliban Landing (1987) interestingly depicts a human expedition to map a new planet (Caliban) – and the complex consequences of its landing there (see Colonization of Other Worlds) – from the viewpoint of an Alien female, who becomes embroiled in the ...
Scientific Hoax
A few early sf stories were tall tales or hoaxes told with clear or likely intent to deceive: examples include chronic hoaxer Edgar Allan Poe's Balloon adventure "Hans Phaall – A Tale" (June 1835 The Southern Literary Messenger), the "Great Moon Hoax" concocted by Richard Adams Locke (whom see), and J L Riddell's ...
Ogilvy, David
(1955- ) Australian author whose Escape from Jupiter (1994) is a Tie to the thirteen-episode Young Adult Television series, Escape from Jupiter (1994), a Space Opera for which he was a writer. A second series, Return to Jupiter (1997), also 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 ...