(1856-1943) Serbian-born inventor, engineer and futurist, in the US from 1884, where he was immediately hired by Thomas A Edison (1847-1931) for the Edison Machine Works. The association with Edison would benefit and plague both men for the rest of their lives: Edison the pragmatic (and sometimes unscrupulous) inventor as entrepreneur; Tesla the visionary (and sometimes nearly demented) inventor as Mad Scientist and/or prophet > though the first novel to feature him – Weldon J Cobb's To Mars with Tesla; Or, the Mystery of the Hidden World (1901) – treats him as another Edison, with an emphasis on the Technology of invention. Tesla's own far-reaching Inventions, both real and hypothetical, an...

Read more about Tesla, Nikola

Imaginary countries are common in the literatures of the world, but only some can properly be called Ruritanian. In The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by the UK writer Anthony Hope, Rudolf Rassendyll, a leisured and insouciant young Britisher of the 1890s, travels on a whim, via Paris and Dresden, to the small, feudal, independent, German-speaking middle-European kingdom of Ruritania, located somewhere east-southeast of the latter city. Here he discovers that he is the virtual Double (> The Encyclopedia of Fantasy) of the king to be, who is also named Rudolf (the dream-like nature of the Ruritanian tale is often intensified by doublings and other enabling devices). As a freelance participant in th...

Read more about Ruritania

(1938-2012) French artist (for some time resident in the USA); staggeringly prolific, remarkably inventive and influential, he was better known in the sf field as Moebius. With his loose, eloquent line style, Giraud was considered one of Europe's major talents, and his work influenced an entire generation of fantasy and sf artists. Born near Paris, he displayed from childhood a love of illustration. His early influences were classic US Comic strips and the engravings of Gustave Doré (1833-1883). He attended the Ecole des Arts Appliqués 1954-1956, and then wrote and drew a Western comic strip before being drafted into the French army. On discharge in 1960 he worked as an assistant to the Belg...

Read more about Giraud, Jean

(1866-1946) UK writer, publishing at least 160 novels from 1887 until just before his death, some as by Anthony Partridge; most of them are tales of espionage or society detective mysteries, the best known being The Great Impersonation (1920), a non-fantastic thriller. His sf novels of interest – several of the titles given in the Checklist below are romantic-fantasy potboilers, some with Ruritanian elements – begin with The Mysterious Mr Sabin (1898), whose mysterious protagonist attempts in the very Near Future to foment an Invasion of Britain with the aid of his Invention of a devastating electric Weapon.Variations on this pattern of story would recur throughout Oppenheim's long career, g...

Read more about Oppenheim, E Phillips