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Wednesday 19 February 2025
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 18 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Nawaz, Saleema
(1979- ) Canadian author, active from around 2000; her second novel, Songs for the End of the World (2020), whose protagonists – one the author of a novel about a deadly plague – react variously in the very Near Future as a Pandemic begins to spread, soon infecting New York. Much detail is provided. The outcome is uncertain. [JC]
Fuentes, Carlos
(1928-2012) Mexican diplomat and author whose acerbic Magic Realism – a more worldly version of that idiom than found in the works of his coeval, Gabriel García Márquez (1928-2014) – featured in stories and novels from the 1950s on. From his first collection of short stories – Los días enmascarados ["The Masked Days"] (coll 1954; part trans Margaret Sayers Peden as ...
Cassidy, James
Pseudonym of UK author Edith Mary Steane (1861-1942), who produced several Anthologies under her own name, and, as Cassidy, The Gift of Life (1897), featuring a substance known as "life-lymph" which, when patients are inoculated with it, seems vastly to increase their resistance to death (see Immortality). [JC]
Life Returns
Film (1935). Scienart Pictures/Universal Pictures. Produced by Lou L Ostrow. Directed by Eugene Frenke and James P Hogan (not the sf author). Written by L Wolfe Gilbert, John F Goodrich, Arthur T Horman and Mary McCarthy, from a story by Hogan. Cast includes George P Breakston, Valerie Hobson, Onslow Stevens and Lois Wilson. 63 minutes, sometimes cut to 60 minutes. Black and white. / Dr John Kendrick (Stevens) has spent his life working on a method of reviving the dead (see ...
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. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...