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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 ...
Cohn, Norman
(1915-2007) UK linguistic scholar and historian, who remains best-known for his first work of significance, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957; exp 1961), a seminal study of medieval European millennial sects, which are here definitively anatomized in terms of their belief in an apocalyptic End of the World (see also Eschatology), which is normally signalled and led by Iconic ...
Year 24 Group
["Nijūyo-nen-gumi"] Critical shorthand used in Japanese Manga Fandom and academia to describe the community of female creators who transformed girls' comics in the 1970s, making a striking and enduring impact on multiple genres, including sf (see Women SF Writers). The name derives from the happenstance that several of the prime movers in the field were born in or around ...
Anderson, Dwayne
(1982- ) Canadian author whose first sf novel, Alien Conflict (2002) features an Alien attempt to prevent World War Four on Earth; his second is Hellfire Apocalypse (2004). [JC]
Mythology
The relationship of mythology to sf is close and deep, but not always obvious. Part of the confusion stems from the widely held belief that sf is itself a form of latter-day mythology, fulfilling comparable hungers in us. James Blish took issue with this argument, pointing out that myth is usually "static and final in intent and thus entirely contrary to the spirit of sf, which assumes continuous change". We restrict ourselves below to the role of ...
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 ...