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Sunday 3 November 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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Ryan, C J
(? - ) Pseudonymous US author whose Gloria VanDeen Space Opera sequence, featuring the ex-wife of a galactic Emperor (see Galactic Empires) employed as a tough smart high-level interstellar troubleshooter at the Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs, comprises Dexta (2005) and Glorious Treason (2005). The stories are lively but unambitious; Gloria ...
Wade, Tom W
(? - ) UK author who published mainly with sf publishers John Spencer (see Badger Books) under various pseudonyms. As Victor Wadey he wrote two bad yet charming sf novels, A Planet Named Terra (1962) and its sequel The United Planets (1962). The distant planet confusingly called Terra is populated by the Reincarnations of people from Earth, notably Elizabeth I, ...
Martinière, Stephan
(1962- ) French artist, later a resident of America. After some brief training in animation, he went to work for DIC Entertainment in the mid-1980s, temporarily requiring him to move to Japan, and he was soon contributing to a number of animated series, including Inspector Gadget (1983-1986), Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors (1985), MASK (1985), The Real Ghost Busters (1986-1991), and Madeline ...
Optimism and Pessimism
In the most simplistic version of the History of SF, sf was always (and rightly) an optimistic literature until the New Wave came along in the 1960s and spoiled everything. This was at best a very partial truth, being only usefully, though by no means universally, applicable to Genre SF, but not to the Scientific Romance, nor to the loose array of works by ...
Fantastic Story Quarterly
US reprint Pulp magazine, 23 issues Spring 1950 to Spring 1955, the title changing after Spring 1951 to Fantastic Story Magazine; published by Best Books, a subsidiary of Standard Magazines. Sam Merwin Jr was editor until Fall 1951, being succeeded by Samuel Mines and then by Alexander Samalman for the last two issues. / Most of the reprints were from ...
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 ...