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Tuesday 6 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 6 June 2023
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Bynner, Edwin Lassetter
(1842-1893) US historical author whose The Chase of the Meteor and Other Stories (coll 1891) presents for a young audience various fantastical tales, most notably the Flatland story "A Cruise in a Soap Bubble", which takes off from Edwin A Abbott's Flatland (1884). [JC]
Automata
An automaton is a constructed device with powered working parts, often but not necessarily humanoid, often but not always immobile, never conscious, and generally designed to be seen (unless it is specifically hidden). Because it does not think, it cannot be a slave (see Slavery). As much spectacle as Machine, it has been over the centuries often been presented as a Predictive image of humanity's ...
Edmonds, Harry
(1891-1989) UK author, in active service during World War One, who is of sf interest for several adventure tales and of some Near-Future novels, beginning with The North Sea Mystery: A Story of Naval Intelligence Work (1930), which features land-launched torpedoes that threaten to sink the entire Royal Navy. In The Riddle of the Straits (1931), a Future War story set in ...
Defoe, Daniel
(1660-1731) UK merchant, professional spy and man of letters born Daniel Foe, becoming Defoe in the 1690s after he began to write; the extremely prolific author of many works of various kinds under a variety of names (once estimated to exceed 200 in number), though the huge canon of unsigned and pseudonymous works once attributed to him has been convincingly diminished to somewhere slightly in excess of 300 titles in all. He is best known today for his novel ...
Foote, Bud
(1930-2005) Scholar, political activist and music enthusiast; Professor Emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Literature, Communication and Culture from 1957-1999 and co-ordinator of one of the first university-level sf courses in America. He is the author of The Connecticut Yankee in the Twentieth Century: Travel to the Past in Science Fiction (1991), which argues that Mark Twain's ...
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 ...