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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 ...
Sheean, Vincent
(1899-1975) US journalist, traveller and author best known for nonfiction like An American Among the Riffi (1926); he witnessed the Nazi takeover of Prague, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). Of some sf interest is The Tide (1933), which traces the consequences of the Reincarnation of Jesus Christ in a small American city. [JC]
Huang Fan
Pseudonym of Huang Xiaozhong (1950- ) a Chinese author whose occasional experiments in sf, Equipoise and the absurd have made him a distinct and distinguished voice in modern Taiwanese fiction. A former engineer and factory manager, he turned to writing full-time in the 1980s, except for a prolonged hiatus from 1993-2003 when he was secluded in a Buddhist monastery. He came to prominence with the non-sf ...
Where Have All the People Gone?
Made-for-tv film (1974). Metromedia/NBC. Directed by John L Moxey. Teleplay Lewis John Carlino, Sandor Stern, from a story by Carlino. Cast includes Verna Bloom, Peter Graves, George O'Hanlon Jr and Ken Sanson. 72 minutes. Colour. / A man and his teenage children are in a cave when a solar flare creates a virus (!) which kills, then reduces to something like sand, almost everybody on Earth. Following this global Disaster the family journeys across ...
Erdrich, Louise
(1954- ) US author whose many novels, most set in or adjacent to Ojibwe/Chippewa country in North Dakota, have strongly and rightly shaped the presentation of Native American experience over the past century of life under the complex and oppressive surveillance of a guilt-ridden but compulsively exploitive conqueror civilization, composing a series of what may be thought of as a series of Westerns as transgressively revisionist as the ...
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 ...