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Friday 26 April 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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Weisinger, Mort
(1915-1978) US editor, actively involved in sf Fandom from the early 1930s, editing Fantasy Magazine, the leading Fanzine of its day; he also sold a few sf stories, starting with The Price of Peace (1933 chap), this, according to Science Fiction Bibliography (1935 chap) by William Crawford and D R Welch, being a chapbook edition from ...
Thought-Variant
Term introduced by F Orlin Tremaine in the December 1933 issue of Astounding, describing an idea-centred type of story he aimed to include in each issue henceforth. These "thought-variant" stories, as distinct from the action-adventure sf tradition of the Pulp magazine, should each develop an idea that "has been slurred over or passed by in many, many stories". The same issue carried Tremaine's first ...
Barnard, Keith
(? - ) UK author whose two sf novels combine horror tropes and Medicine; the particular focus in Embryo (1990) is made clear by its title, while The Betz Cell (1991) applies Near Future medical science to communicating with the dead. [JC]
Hershman, Morris
(1926- ) US author whose sf novel, Shareworld (1972; vt The Crash of 2086 1976), takes a Dystopian view of the stock market dominating the entire world and anticipates a final and definitive Crash. [JC]
Acriche, Marc Daniel
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the Young Adult Drained (2021), is set in a Near Future New York with a focus on municipal Politics, though strong hints of Climate Change put this in context. By 2048, a tyrannical mayor has transformed New York into a repressive city state; 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 ...