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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 ...
Wren, M K
(1938-2016) US author who initially concentrated on mysteries, the Conan Flagg series being nonfantastic. Her Phoenix Legacy trilogy – Sword of the Lamb (1981), Shadow of the Swan (1981) and House of the Wolf (1981) – uses a carefully thought out Future History to justify an intricate plot which compounds together Space Opera, romance and political thriller ...
Blyton, Enid
(1897-1968) UK author, exclusively for children, and mostly for younger readers; it is estimated that from the beginning of her career in 1922 she may have published as many as 700 separate titles, most of them very short, like the Faraway Tree tales, in which various worlds are accessed entirely by Magic. This vast oeuvre is so overloaded with racist, sexist and class prejudices that most of her titles are more or less unreprintable in their original state. Nor ...
Rabin, Staton
(1958- ) US author of two Young Adult novels, Black Powder (2005) and The Curse of the Romanovs (2007), both involving Time Travel: the young protagonist of the first, using his teacher's Invention of a Time Machine, travels back to the thirteenth century in order to deter Roger Bacon ...
Trevayne, Emma
(? - ) US author whose work is restricted to works for younger child and for the Young Adult market, beginning with the Coda sequence comprising Coda (2013) and Chorus (2014), set in a Near Future Dystopia; the young protagonist, armed with Music, subverts the tyranny in charge in time to save the ...
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 ...