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Sunday 19 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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Higginson, H W
(? -? ) US author of whom nothing is known beyond The Elixir (1930 chap), a Superman story published by Hugo Gernsback in his Science Fiction Series. The eponymous Drug massively increases intelligence in those to whom it is fed; but deadly conflicts ensue. [JC]
Poore, Michael
(? - ) US author whose first novel, Up Jumps the Devil (2012), is a supernatural fantasy whose Antihero protagonist, John Scratch, is in fact the Devil; he has come up to America to "improve" it. Of more direct sf interest is Poore's second novel, Reincarnation Blues (2017), in which fantasy, horror and sf jostle Equipoisally, with sf sequences in particular – ...
Venter, Eben
(1954- ) South African author, in Australia from 1986. His fiction is almost entirely nonfantastic, much of it depicting, with some autobiographical elements, the ethical and political dilemmas that might characteristically confront a nonconforming white man born and raised Afrikaaner in a dissolving world. Of sf interest is Horrelpoot (2006; trans Luke Stubbs as Trencherman 2008), set in a devastated Near Future ...
Hyde, Mark Powell
(1881-1952) US author in whose Young Adult novel, The Strange Inventor: A Curious Adventure Story (1927), Merlin Time Travels incognito to the twentieth century, where he meets the young protagonist, and amazes him with the engineless car (another of his Inventions) in which he carries him away. The two visit the future, where adventures are had, and the past, ditto. Merlin himself is a ...
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 ...