SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 15 May 2024
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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 ...
Savitsky, Georgiy
(1981- ) Pen-name for Georgiy Polevodov, Russian-Ukrainian author of many War novels, some of which drifted into Alternate History and a Future History favouring, and some cases chillingly foreshadowing, the strategic policies of Vladimir Putin in the twenty-first century. His least contentious genre work is arguably ...
Holt, Tom
(1961- ) UK author – a solicitor before he turned to full-time writing in 1995 – whose debut was the precocious "Poems by Tom Holt" (coll 1973 chap). He is best known for his numerous comic fantasies, beginning with the genially myth-based Expecting Someone Taller (1987) and Who's Afraid of Beowulf? (1988) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. ...
Maelstrom Speculative Fiction
US low-paying Print Magazine published and edited by David L Felts, Palm Harbor, Florida. It ran for eight issues from Summer 1998 to October 2001, and was in a slim (usually between 28 and 32 pages) large review size (see Magazines) format. Like many Amateur Magazines that emerged in the 1990s, the editor wanted to publish material that was out of the ordinary and would make the reader ...
Imperial Gothic
A term used mainly in literary criticism to describe a complex of motifs, venues and paranoia-inducing utterances whose main burden – that the Western world is under deadly attack from outside its borders – is sometimes narrated in nonfantastic terms, sometimes in terms expressive of Fantastika's not always temperate concern with who rules the planet (see also Gothic SF; Secret Masters). ...
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 ...