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Sunday 5 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.
Site updated on 1 May 2024
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Auster, Paul
(1947-2024) US translator, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970, who came to sudden attention – after years of unrecognized work, culminating in an undemanding Baseball mystery, Squeeze Play (1984) as by Paul Benjamin – with a series of Fabulations playing on detective genres and the French nouveau roman. City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and ...
Trutz-Baumwoll, J M
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? -? ) of "Sendschreiben des deutsch-englischen Zukunfspolitiker" (1871 Außerordentliche Beilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung; trans anon as Forewarned! Forearmed!: The Suggested Invasion of England by the Germans 1871 chap), which takes the Battle of Dorking as a model for the real Invasion of England, an event that (at least as far as ...
Fantastic Monsters of the Films
Cinema magazine, small Bedsheet-size, issued by Black Shield Productions. Seven issues from 1962 to 1963, on a bimonthly roughly schedule. Publishers were sf fan Bob Burns and film special effects artist Paul Blaisdell. Edited by Ron Haydock. Considerable material was contributed by author Jim Harmon. The magazine was a high-quality attempt to produce a more-mature ...
Edisonade
Daedalus was the first inventor hero, but he was also a bureaucrat; and when he built the Labyrinth he did so as a wage-slave or sharecropper, on hire to the king. For that reason the headword for this entry, which is about the creation of an American dream of freelance heroism, has not been formed from his name. As used here the term "edisonade" or "Edisonade" – which is derived from Thomas Alva Edison in the same way ...
Short, Gertrude
(1902-1968) US film actor and author, none of the films she appeared in being sf; of sf interest, however, is her novel, A Visitor from Venus (1949), in which the eponymous visitor, from a Utopian Venus inhabited solely by females, comes to Earth and expresses her shock in Satirical terms at the condition of women on this planet (see Feminism). [JC]
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. His first professional publication was a long sf-tinged poem, "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly); he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf proper with ...