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Tuesday 15 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Clarke, Joan
(?1921- ) UK author, mostly for children; she is not the Canadian author, Joan Clark. Her books of sf interest include The Happy Planet (1963), set in a Ruined Earth dominated by three contrasting societies, one technophilic, one Utopian on pastoral principles, the last composed of Cyborgs. The second "choice" seems to prevail in the end. Foxon's Hole ...
O'Brien, David
(? - ) UK author of whom nothing is known except that he wrote several early-1950s sf novels for Curtis Warren under various House Names, including the International Research Council sequence – Photomesis (1952) and Black Infinity (1952) as Berl Cameron, continued in Stella Radium Discharge (1952) as ...
Richter, Eugen
(1838-1906) German politician and author, who opposed nineteenth century German antisemitism with vigour and eloquence, and as a liberal opposed the government of Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). Of sf interest is Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder: frei nach Bebel (1891; trans Henry Wright as Pictures of the Socialistic Future (Freely Adapted from Bebel);vt ...
Petersilea, Carlyle
(1844-1903) US pianist and author of the Discovered Country sequence, a discursive spiritualist Utopia expounded in The Discovered Country (1889) as by Ernst von Himmel and Oceanides: A Psychical Novel (1890) also as by von Himmel, both novels being republished in 1892 as by Petersilea. The series cannot be called sf as such, but is interestingly specific about the afterlife containing no Heaven or Hell but a Platonic world whose ...
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 ...