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Wednesday 8 May 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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Auster, Paul
(1947-2024) US translator, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970, who came to sudden attention – after years of unrecognized work, culminating in an undemanding Baseball mystery, Squeeze Play (1984) as by Paul Benjamin – with a series of Fabulations playing on detective genres and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and ...
Jefferson Starship
Also known as Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation and Starship. US psychedelic rock band, formed, as "Jefferson Airplane" in Los Angeles in 1965 by Marty Balin (1942-2018) and Paul Kantner, amongst others; later joined by Grace Slick (1939- ) whose songwriting skills and distinctive voice contributed a great deal to the commercial success of the band. The folk-rock and LSD-experimentalism of their early albums ...
Crowley, Nate
(? - ) UK author whose sf series, The Schneider Wrack Chronicles, comprises two short novels plus a previously unpublished tale, all assembled as The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack (omni 2017). The protagonist, a criminal who has been executed and reanimated as a Zombie, finds himself indentured on a vast ship on the planet Ocean, where he is part of a crew hunting whale-like ...
Sci Fi
Pronounced "si fi" or sometimes "sky fi", an abbreviation for "science fiction" whose first recorded use was in 1954, when the term "hi-fi" (high-fidelity) was becoming popular in the context of audio equipment. The wordplay-loving Forrest J Ackerman claimed to have invented the term and later promoted it eagerly in his Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-1983). However, Ackerman's first known use of the term ...
Jensen, Norman
(1933- ) UK author of The Galactic Colonizers (1971), an sf adventure for Robert Hale Limited involving encounters with unusual Aliens. [JC]
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 ...