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Monday 24 January 2022
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 24 January 2022
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Wizard of Mars, The
Film (1965; vt Horrors of the Red Planet). American General Pictures. Directed by David L Hewitt. Written by David L Hewitt, based on a story by Armando Busick and David L Hewitt inspired by the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L Frank Baum. Cast includes Eve Bernhardt, John Carradine, Roger Gentry, Vic McGee and Jerry Rannow. 85 minutes. / Four astronauts from Earth – Steve (Gentry), Doc (McGee), Charlie (Rannow), and Dorothy (Bernhardt) – on a mission to orbit and ...
Doppelgangers
Literally, "double-walkers". To meet one's own supernatural double (or Scots "fetch") was traditionally an unlucky or fatal portent; a well-known treatment of this theme is Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "William Wilson" (in The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present, anth 1839 dated 1840), a tale that manifests the recurrent, compulsive focus of the Gothic (see Gothic SF) on Doppelgangers. Even when rationalized through sf devices – typically Time Travel – such encounters can ...
House, Brant
House Name associated with the magazine Secret Agent "X" (which see for fuller details). The Secret Agent "X" character was created by Paul Chadwick (1902-1972), who wrote many of the long lead stories by whose titles the issues are traditionally distinguished; another prolific contributor, also as House, was G T Fleming-Roberts (1910-1968). Seven of these title stories, mostly by Chadwick, were reissued as novels by Corinth Books in 1966 [see Checklist below]; but this attempted revival was ...
Bernau, George
(1945-2005) US lawyer and author of three Alternate-History thrillers: in Promises to Keep (1988) a figure based on John F Kennedy recovers from the attempt to assassinate him; in Candle in the Wind (1990) Marilyn Monroe survives her semi-accidental overdose; and in Black Phoenix (1994), Germany acquires, at the end of World War Two, a super weapon that threatens to create a modification of the Hitler Wins scenario, though in this case it is Joseph Goebbels who, having faked his death, ...
Day, Vox
(1968- ) Pseudonym of US computer Game designer and fantasy author Theodore Beale, co-founder of the video game company Fenris Wolf which developed the Rebel Moon game. As Beale he has written the Eternal Warriors sequence of fundamentalist-Christian fantasy novels; his sf contribution, as Day, is the game Tie Rebel Moon (1996) with Bruce Bethke. The game scenario, with a Libertarian Moon battling Earth's oppression, strongly echoes Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh ...
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 the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...