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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 ...
Vogt, Josh
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Soul Shop" in The Leading Edge for October 2006; his most ambitious work may be a fantasy series, The Cleaners, beginning with Enter the Janitor (2015) [series not listed below]. His sf is restricted to Ties to Videogames, though at least one, Solar Singularity ...
Jiang Yunsheng
(1944- ) Chinese author, translator and occasional poet on Equipoisal themes. Jiang graduated in history from Shanghai's Fudan University in 1967, and remained in an academic career, retiring as a professor of Chinese literature at the Shanghai TV University. Striking for its adult themes at a time when so much Chinese sf was Children's SF his "Wubian de Jianlian" (November 1987 ...
Foster, L B
(? -? ) Australian author of an sf novel, The Hocus Root (1944), in which the eponymous shrub confers Invisibility on the protagonist after he has come in contact with it. [JC]
Labyrinths
Labyrinths and mazes have a long history, and distinctions between them have long been blurred. The archetypal maze was a two-dimensional pattern, often cut in turf, to be traversed voluntarily as a kind of ritual Game. Even traditional hedge-mazes like Hampton Court's in London do not offer serious physical barriers; thus the narrator of Alasdair Gray's Five Letters from an Eastern Empire (1979 ...
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 ...