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Friday 2 June 2023
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 29 May 2023
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Dangerous Visions
Original Anthology series edited by Harlan Ellison. Dangerous Visions (anth 1967), whose success inspired its successors, was a massive and influential anthology of 33 stories and copious prefatory material; it became strongly identified with the New Wave in the USA. Among its stories, "Aye, and Gomorrah ..." by Samuel R Delany, "Gonna Roll ...
Jakobson, Lars
(1959- ) Swedish librarian and author. An sf enthusiast since childhood, Lars Jakobson wrote his examination thesis at the Swedish Librarian college on sf published in Sweden 1953-1976. His work is founded on a wide reading and deep affection for classical sf, but at the same time also in his fascination with modernist literary techniques (see Modernism in SF) and in transhumanist philosophy. His first ...
Appel, Benjamin
(1907-1977) US author, long and variously active, known mainly for such work outside the sf field as Brain Guy (1934) and The Raw Edge (1958). In his sf novel, The Funhouse (1959; vt The Death Master 1974), satirical (see Satire) and Linguistic sideshows sometimes illuminate the story of two Utopias as the Chief of Police from the anti-technological ...
Gadallah, Leslie
(1939- ) Canadian author best known for her Empire of Kaz sequence – starting with Cat's Pawn (1987) – in which a human protagonist becomes involved with the eponymous Cat-like Alien Orioni, themselves involved in a desperate war against the invading Kazi, who dominate much of the Galaxy by the end of the second volume, which ends on an unusual downbeat, suggesting that further volumes ...
Morison, Frank
Pseudonym of UK author Albert Henry Ross (1881-1950), in whose remotely told Scientific Romance, Sunset (1932), an entity from another planet establishes Communication with Earth, and conveys the humans the postulate that the theory of Evolution needs to be modified because life on Earth is the result of a cosmic error. [JC]
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 ...