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Thursday 19 May 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.
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Romano, Deane
(1927-2011) US author and screenwriter, active in the latter capacity with scripts like "Angels' Flight" (1962). Some of his work dealt with current investigations into parapsychology (see Psi Powers), and his filmscript on this subject was novelized by Louis Charbonneau as The Sensitives (1968). Romano's own sf novel, Flight from Time One (1972), also treated parapsychology, this time in the didactic tale of an elite squad of "astralnauts" whose members take on missions in their astral bodies, ...
Watt, Laura
(? - ) US journalist and author whose Carry Me Back (1997) is a Time Travel tale whose protagonist goes back to a hypnotic (and toxic) 1951, late in the short life of Hank Williams (1923-1 January 1953); the time travel fades into the background and (though there is a romantic element) the music takes over. [JC]
Last Man on Earth, The
US silent film (1924). Fox Film Corporation. Directed by John G Blystone. Written by Donald W Lee. Based on "The Last Man on Earth" (November 1923 Munsey's Magazine) by John D Swain. Cast includes Earle Foxe, Martha Mattox and Derelys Perdue. 70 minutes. Black and white. / Though at least two copies of this film survive and it has occasionally been shown at exhibitions, it is not generally available. The main sources for this entry are given under links below. It is possible that the ...
Lost Races
The lost-race sf theme goes hand in hand with that of the Lost World; there are few lost worlds, lands, continents, Islands, or regions Underground (see Hollow Earth) which do not come equipped with one or more indigenous races ripe for First Contact and perhaps displaying interesting quirks for the student of Anthropology. / The famous eighteenth-century precursors of the theme, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735) and Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter ...
Gratacap, Louis Pope
(1851-1917) US naturalist, museum curator and author whose first writings were nonfiction essays like "The Ice Age" for the Popular Science Monthly in 1878. His first sf novel, The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd (1903), remains his best known. Dying in the conviction that dead humans transcendentally ascend to a Martian Reincarnation as embodied spirits, the narrator's father is soon communicating from there by radio with his son. Martian ...
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 ...