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Friday 13 September 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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Curtis, Richard A
(1937- ) US editor, literary agent and author, known mainly in the first capacity for his anthology Future Tense (anth 1968), which is not to be confused with Kendell Foster Crossen's Future Tense (anth 1952). He has also published short work, beginning with "Introduction to 'The Saint'" in Cavalier for 1968, as well as Squirm: Novelization (1976), an sf ...
Thought Experiment
In Physics, a thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment is a common means of exploring the implications of scientific assumptions without resorting to actual apparatus. Einstein's development of Relativity employed thought experiments about light signals exchanged between observers whose relative speed was a significant fraction of the speed of light, not easily attained by any real observer or (at that time) measuring device. The ...
Shannon, Terence
(? - ) US author in whose What Happened to the Indians (2000) America is threatened with an Alien Invasion, these events prefigured by UFO landings in the 1940s; and responds more vigorously than the "Indians" did when the white man first came to the continent. A markedly right-wing pattern of argument (see Politics), presented ...
Hile, William H
(1869-1943) US geologist, entrepreneur – he founded the African Ostrich Farm and Feather Company in 1909 to sell ostrich products, profits (which proved to be as scarce as hens' teeth) to be shared with its African suppliers – and author of a Lost Race novel, The Ostrich for the Defense (1912), set in the heart of Asia Minor, where a white queen named Zar rules a benign Utopia on lines enhancing social ...
Kehuan Shijie
[Literally "SF World", although the publisher's preferred translation is "Science Fiction World"] The journal of record of the modern sf community in China, Kehuan Shijie was founded in 1979 in Chengdu, Sichuan, as the State-supported Kexue Wenyi ["Science Literature and Art"], one of several magazines that sprang up amid a post-Mao renewal of interest in science popularization. However, with a sudden reversal in the Party line on sf, and claims that the ...
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 ...