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Friday 17 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 ...
Barton, William R
(1950- ) US author who has concentrated for most of his career on sf novels set in Space Opera arenas; within this normally expansive frame, he tends to focus on intimate venues, where stressful interactions amongst sometimes dysfunctional characters give a dark, closet-drama feel to his tales. His first novel, however, Hunting on Kunderer (1973), traditionally confronts humans with Alien natives on ...
Freeman, Gillian
(1929-2019) UK author active from around 1955; she is of sf interest for The Leader (1966), set in the kind of Near Future Dystopian UK threatened, as not infrequently in novels of this category published in post-war UK, by the rise of a fascist nonentity through an increasingly ruthless exploitation of racial and ethnic prejudices to promote his Britain First party. The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), ...
Howgego, Raymond John
(1946- ) UK traveller and author whose studies of explorations and excursions have culminated in the Encyclopedia of Exploration sequence beginning with Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 (2003), with 5,000+ entries in 4,000,000 words. The scope of the final volume of the series is revealed in its full title, ...
Baraniecki, Marek
(1954- ) Polish environmental engineer, journalist and author, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Karlgoro, godzina 18" ["Karlgoro, 6 p.m."] for Fantastyka in January 1983, stylistically rather conventional and plain but conceptually an invigorating meditation on the power of human spirit and mind versus chaos. The story involves a group of military mentalists supervised by a spiritual guru of incredible powers ...
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 ...