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Friday 13 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Depestre, René
(1926- ) Haitian poet and author, his life being spent elsewhere, his political activism, initially as a Communist, requiring constant displacements until he settled in France after about 1968; active from 1945. He is of some sf interest for Hadriana dans tous mes têves (1988 trans Kaiama L Glover as Hadriana in All My Dreams 2017), which Equipoisally conflates Haitian legends and "scientific" explanations of ...
Wilson, Angus
(1913-1991) UK author who published some early supernatural horror, like "Totentanz" (May 1949 Horizon), assembled with other tales including "Raspberry Jam" in The Wrong Set (coll 1949), but who remains best known for satirical non-fantastic anatomies of modern middle-class England like Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958). His one sf tale, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961), applies techniques typical of ...
Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Liberty
Major US weekly magazine which ran from 10 May 1924 to July 1950. It was founded by Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune who wanted a magazine along the lines of Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post. Liberty never reached the heights of those magazines, but it was still regarded as a prestigious market. The initial editor, John Neville Wheeler, built up the circulation primarily for women ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...