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Tuesday 14 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.
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Argosy, The
US Magazine established by Frank A Munsey and historically important as the first ever Pulp magazine when it changed format (October 1896) and switched to pulp paper (December 1896). It was published weekly from 9 December 1882 as The Golden Argosy, became The Argosy from 1 December 1888, went monthly April 1894-September 1917, then weekly, as Argosy Weekly, 6 October 1917 to 17 July ...
Archer, Jeffrey
(1940- ) UK Conservative politician and author of many thrillers, most notorious in the early twenty-first century for his imprisonment on a count of perjury; in his Near Future sf novel, Shall We Tell the President? (1977; rev 1985), the American president who may or may not be informed of a plot against his life is Edward Kennedy, whose gun control laws are opposed vehemently. The revised edition is transformed into a ...
Future Fantasy
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on cheap newsprint. Publisher: Cousins Publications. Editor: Timothy G Beckley. Three bimonthly issues published in 1978. / Unusually for a media magazine of this period, Future Fantasy contained an ongoing Comic strip titled Captain Cosmos and written by editor Beckley, while some poor-quality sf stories appeared amid the routine film articles. Besides sf ...
Wild Cards
Original-Anthology series, edited by George R R Martin, with the initially unacknowledged collaboration of Melinda M Snodgrass, variously credited from the sixth volume on, set in a Shared World, almost every volume being a Braid of stories by various authors woven into a more-or-less integrated narrative. Martin ...
Transportation
Sf stories based on serious speculations about future means of transportation are greatly outnumbered by stories in which those means function as facilitating devices – i.e., as convenient ways of shifting characters into an alien environment. Inevitably, the same kinds of machines crop up in both categories of story because stories of the second kind borrow heavily from those of the first. Spaceships have been employed by sf writers almost exclusively as 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 ...