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Tuesday 19 March 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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de Vere, Howard
Pseudonym of US author William Howard Van Orden (?1816-?1894), active in the later nineteenth century as an author of tales for Boys' Papers. Three titles have been discovered to be of sf interest: The Demon of the Deep; Or, Above and Beneath the Waves (1876 The Boys of New York; 1893 chap), an Under the Sea adventure for boys with Inventions galore, including a submarine ...
Cope, Julian
(1957- ) UK singer-songwriter, formerly lead singer of The Teardrop Explodes, who has since the 1980s released a number of playfully apocalyptic albums as a solo artist. The song "Upwards at 45" (in Jehovahkill, 1993) is a psychedelic account of Alien contact. Autogeddon (1994) – the album takes its title from the poet Heathcote Williams (whom see) – envisions cars ...
Ross, David D
(1955- ) US author who began publishing sf with his Dreamers of the Day sequence – The Argus Gambit (1989) and The Eighth Rank (1991) – which complicatedly traces the political and cultural consequences of a twenty-first-century Ecological mystery that first threatens South American crops, then presages a possible worldwide Disaster. The seriousness with which he ...
Ruins and Futurity
Ruins are not a necessary prelude to Futurity. A ruined structure may be nothing more than a structure that has fallen into illegible ruin (see Entropy), leaving no message for us to draw upon: no warning to the world we live in, no sense that it fronts in stone a meaningful Time Abyss, or some anticipation of things to come. But from time immemorial a Ruin, or in more recent times an Edifice constructed in the shape of a Ruin [for ...
Shaw, Ali
(1982- ) UK author who remains best known for his first novel, The Girl with Glass Feet (2009), a fantasy in which elements of folklore surface through the tale of the metamorphosis of a young woman into glass; The Man Who Rained (2012) is also fantasy. Of some sf interest is The Trees (2016), set in a UK suddenly afflicted by a supernatural-seeming Disaster, a sudden countrywide irruption of ...
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 ...