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Thursday 16 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 ...
Matas, Carol
(1949- ) Canadian author, most of her work being directed to Young Adult readers, with a strong interest in the dramatizing of Jewish/Israeli issues. A considerable portion of her work is of sf interest, starting with her first novel, The DNA Dimension (1982), whose young cast is suddenly transmitted into a heavily regimented Dystopian ...
King, Maggie Shen
(? - ) Taiwan-born author, in USA from the age of sixteen, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Ball and Chain" in Asimov's for February 2014. This story is essentially the first chapter of her first novel, An Excess Male (2017), set in a Near Future Dystopian China, whose genuine historical One-Child attempts to control ...
McQuinn, Donald E
(1930- ) US soldier and author whose first sf novel (his fifth overall), Warrior (1990), packs into its setting – a Ruined Earth America 500 years after the nation's nuclear destruction – almost every Cliché available to writers of barbarian-warrior novels: a variety of agon-based tribal societies; a woman-run church; a batch of twenty-first-century warriors freshly resurrected ...
Barbet, Pierre
Pseudonym of Dr Claude Pierre Marie Avice (1925-1995), French author, under his real name a pharmacist and an expert on bionics; he also used the pseudonyms David Maine and Olivier Sprigel. A highly prolific if derivative popular writer of sf from his first publication, of sf interest, Vers un Avenir Perdu ["Towards a Lost Future"] (1962), Barbet published dozens of novels over the next 30 years, ending his career with L'Ere du Spatiopithèque ["The Era of 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 ...