SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 January 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 6 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
Man with Two Brains, The
Film (1983). Aspen Film Society. Directed by Carl Reiner. Written by Reiner, Steve Martin, George Gipe. Cast includes Steve Martin, Kathleen Turner and David Warner. 93 minutes, cut to 86 minutes. Colour. / Pastiche is the essence of most Steve Martin comedies; his self-indulgent acting style becomes rapidly tiresome when his performances are not focused by a good director, but Reiner is good, and this is a genuinely funny film spoofing the ...
Knapp, George L
(1872-1950) US journalist and author, whose The Face of Air (1912) is set on an apparently deserted ship "haunted" by an ape whose Invisibility is the result of a chemist's misapplied Invention. [JC]
Anderson, Chester
(1932-1991) US author and poet, member of the Beat Generation, editor of underground journals on both coasts, and of Paul Williams's Crawdaddy, a rock'n'roll magazine (1968-1969); he wrote poetry as c v j anderson. His most straightforward sf was written in association with Michael Kurland, Ten Years to Doomsday (1964), a straight collaboration, being a lightly written ...
Brebner, Winston
(1924-2004) US author whose sf novel Doubting Thomas (1956) depicts a computer-ruled Dystopia; the protagonist of the tale, a magistrate in his centrally controlled state, secretly becomes a clown once a year, during the State Holiday, giving some opportunities for Satire. The novel also explores the metaphysical pathos of clowning in a world that disallows any element of Revel. [JC]
Davis, Brett
(? - ) US newspaper reporter from 1989, with Aerospace Daily (2001-2005) and subsequently with backfence.com, whose Bone Wars sequence of sf novels, Bone Wars (1998) and Two Tiny Claws (1999), amusingly sets two historical nineteenth-century paleontologists – Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) and Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899) – against each other in Montana in a search for ...
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 ...