SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 22 April 2024
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Gibbons, Stella
(1902-1989) UK journalist and author whose best-known novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), is set in a moderately explicit Near Future, sometime after the 1946 Anglo-Nicaraguan War, when videophones and private airplanes are common. The story itself, a savagely comic Parody of epiphany-choked rural novels as written by D H Lawrence (1885-1930) and in particular Mary Webb (1881-1927) with Precious Bane (1924), ...
Douglass, Ellsworth
Pseudonym of US real-estate speculator, insurance broker and author Elmer Dwiggins (1863-1933), whose enterprises (for which he was jailed in 1919-1920) took him to various countries around the turn of the century; his fiction, including his one sf novel, was written during these travels. His first story, "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (September 1899 Cassell's Magazine) with Edwin Pallander, describes a gyroscopically controlled ...
Amazing Stories Science Fiction Novel
US Digest-size magazine. One undated issue, June 1957, published by Ziff-Davis; edited (uncredited) by Paul W Fairman. This was to be a quarterly magazine printing book-length novels in imitation of Galaxy Science Fiction Novels. The only novel was Henry Slesar's routine novelization of the film ...
Spencer, Leonard G
Ziff-Davis House Name used at least twice by Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett in collaboration, for the stories "The Beast With 7 Tails" (August 1956 Amazing) and "The Girl from Bodies, Inc." (October 1956 Fantastic). A third Spencer story, "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" (February 1957 ...
West, Rebecca
Pseudonym of UK journalist and author Cicily Isabel Fairfield Andrews (1892-1983), H G Wells's partner 1913-1923; she also wrote as by Lynx. She began to publish her astute and polemical nonfiction around 1911; her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), which stretches its nonfantastic mode to the limit, stands as a very early response to the profound trauma of World War One. The soldier, who is a victim of ...
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 ...