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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 ...
Swainston, Steph
(1974- ) UK author whose Castle sequence beginning with The Year of Our War (2004), though clearly understandable as Fantasy, does in fact inhabit a Multiverse some of whose iterations are clearly worlds understandable in sf terms. A hint of Medieval Futurism suffuses some of these worlds, and leads to the apprehension that the central story may itself ...
Brain Dead
Film (1989). Concorde/New Horizons. Directed Adam Simon. Written by Charles Beaumont. Cast includes Patricia Charbonneau, Bud Cort, George Kennedy, Bill Paxton, Nicholas Pryor and Bill Pullman. 81 minutes. Colour. / A neurosurgeon (Pullman) is asked to examine a genius (Cort) who has gone mad and killed his family. The surgeon soon finds that his own Identity is being alarmingly eaten away, with his friends, colleagues ...
Evans, Henry Ridgely
(1861-1949) US amateur magician, journalist and author, much of whose career was spent investigating (and in general debunking) occult lore and religious bodies, including Theosophy. Edgar Allan Poe and Baron von Kempelen's Chess-Playing Automaton (1939) analyses the famous chess-playing machine (operated in fact by a human inside the apparatus), which Edgar Allan Poe speculated about in an essay, "Maelzel's Chess ...
Mauclair, Camille
(1872-1945) French poet, controversialist and author, notable in World War One for deploring German excesses and in World War Two for expressing anti-Semitic views in support of the Nazi occupation of France. Before the turn of the century, he had gained some fame as a Symbolist poet, and critical advocate of literary experimentation short of Modernism; he later attacked most twentieth-century because of its (as he ...
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 ...