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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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Mayo, W S
(1811-1895) US physician and author whose Kaloolah; Or, Journeyings to the Djébel Kumri: An Autobiography of Jonathan Romer (1849) [for vts see Checklist] may have taken its hoax-like, factoid-filled story – with Mayo himself posing as the editor of Romer's manuscript – from Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of A Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (1838), and its exotic Fantastic Voyage ...
de Beauvoir, Simone
(1908-1986) French author, famous for a wide variety of work, whose only sf novel, Tous les hommes son mortels (1946; trans Leonard M Friedman as All Men Are Mortal 1955), examines the dilemmas of Immortality as experienced by the protagonist of the book, who becomes deathless in the thirteenth century, and retrospectively – from a contemporary point of view – makes a case for regretting his condition. [JC]
Moore, Gertrude L
(1886-1981) UK author, mother of Patrick Moore, whose work of sf interest is restricted to Mrs Moore in Space (graph 1974), a picture book for adults comprising a tour of the Solar System and beyond, in the course of which a "bogie" meets a wide range of Extraterrestrials, amicably. [JC]
Alton, Andrea I
(1946- ) US author whose Demon of Undoing (1988), set on a planet dominated by a Cat-like Alien civilization, describes the initially uneasy but ultimately effective rapport between a crippled member of Clan Fen and the human Sig, a surviving member of an expedition whose long-ago impact on the rigidly honour-bound stratified Inkairans had been destabilizing, and who are now remembered as the Demons of ...
Fahy, Christopher
(1937- ) US author whose first works – like The Compost Heap (1970) – convey in mundane contexts a quiet enragedness that can seem scattershot. After his first story with genre content, "Carnival" for Gallery in August 1980 – assembled with much of his short fiction of fantastic interest in Matinee at the Flame (coll 2006) – most of his later work of interest is Horror, though ...
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 ...