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Wednesday 24 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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Tabori, George
Working name of Hungarian-born theatre director and playwright Gyorgi Tábori (1914-2007), brother of Paul Tabori, in UK from 1935, a UK citizen from 1941. He is not of direct sf interest, though his novels and plays set in World War Two, especially those dealing with the Holocaust, are so enraged and extreme in their telling that they seem fantastic; but they are not. [JC]
Spencer, John
(1944-2002) UK author, rock musician and one-time art-agency director, founding what would become Young Artists, a major UK agency for preponderantly sf/fantasy artists. His first sf novel, The Electronic Lullaby Meat Market (1975), in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Mick Farren, sets a quirky thriller in a violently hyperbolic Near-Future world described in sex-charged terms reminiscent of the late-1960s ...
Piercy, Marge
(1936- ) US author who has become recognized as a significant voice of US Feminism, initially with Poetry in volumes like Breaking Camp (coll 1968) but more importantly in novels like Going Down Fast (1969) and Vida (1980). Her first sf novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970), deals with an attempt by a group of student revolutionaries to set up a loving, ...
Colonization of Other Worlds
The idea of colonizing the other worlds of our solar system has had an uncertain history because the optimism of sf writers has constantly been subverted and contradicted by the discoveries of Astronomy. The attractions of the idea have, however, always overridden cautionary pessimism, and the reluctant acceptance of the inhospitability of local planets has served only to increase interest in colonizing the worlds of other stars (see ...
Stirling, S M
(1953- ) French-born author in Canada from childhood; he took out US citizenship in 2003. He began publishing work of genre interest with Snowbrother (1985), the first volume of the Fifth Millennium fantasy sequence, which continued with The Sharpest Edge (1986) with Shirley Meier, The Cage (1989) with Meier, and Shadow's Son (1991) with Meier and Karen ...
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 ...