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Tuesday 24 June 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Loomis, Noel
(1905-1969) US author and editor, active in the magazine field for some time, publishing work under his own name and as Benjamin Miller, and a book as by Silas Water. Though his first novel, Murder Goes to Press (1937), was a thriller, he was most successful as an author of Westerns. In his first sf novel, City of Glass (July 1942 Startling; exp 1955), based on his first sf story, three men are ...
Lang, King
A House Name used by Curtis Warren on a number of sf novels: five by David Griffiths and one each by George Hay, Brian Holloway, John William Jennison and E C Tubb. See Checklist below. [JC]
Clifton, Mark
(1906-1963) US author, an industrial psychologist for many years until his retirement around 1950 – mostly occupied in personnel work, putting together many thousands of case histories from which he extrapolated conclusions after the fashion of Kinsey and Sheldon. This practical experience, and the slant of mind it fuelled, mark his work as a writer, beginning with his first stories of genre interest, "What Have I Done?" in Astounding for May 1952, and the ...
Norden, Eric
(? - ) US journalist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Primal Solution" in Cavalier for January 1968, in which a Jewish scientist develops mental Time Travel, inhabits the mind of Hitler and tries to get him to commit Suicide – unsuccessfully, creating instead within Hitler his hatred for Jews. Norden assembled his short work, including this story, in ...
Heroes
Gilgamesh may be the first named hero in what we think of as the Western World. Like him, most heroes in the cultures of the West are passionate, often rebellious, defenders of and bringers of relief to their homelands, and until perhaps Boudicca (floruit 60-61 CE) always male. They often descended from Gods (see Gods and Demons) but are distinct from them, like Hercules; even Prometheus, the paradigm culture hero in the Western tradition, is not a ...
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 ...