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Monday 29 May 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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Atkey, Bertram
(1879-1952) UK author of many magazine stories, mostly crime fiction – his Smiler Bunn thief-as-hero stories were popular in the 1920s – plus some supernatural and sf tales. His first publication of direct sf interest seems to be "The Strange Case of Alan Moraine" (September 1912 Grand Magazine), whose title character, a noted sportsman, flies an experimental aeroplane (incorporating much new Technology) in hope of setting a high-altitude ...
Mader, Friedrich W
(1866-1945) German author, mainly of juvenile novels, many set in German East Africa and written somewhat in the style of H Rider Haggard. Wunderwelten (1911; trans Max Shachtman as Distant Worlds: The Story of a Voyage to the Planets 1932) is a juvenile which takes its Spaceship crew to Mars and finally – one of the first sf texts to ...
Dixon, Thomas, Jr
(1864-1946) US Baptist minister and author whose The Fall of a Nation: A Sequel to The Birth of a Nation (1915-1916 National Sunday Magazine; 1916) graphically depicts the Near Future Invasion and conquest of the USA by the Imperial Confederation of Europe, dominated by Germany. After years of occupation, a singularly ferocious US womanhood helps the men of the USA expel the enemy. The subtitle refers to the film ...
Changes, The
UK tv series (1975). BBC TV. Produced by Anna Home. Directed by John Prowse. Cast includes Rafiq Anwar, Keith Ashton, Reggae Ranjhe, Jack Watson, Victoria Williams and Marc Zuber. Teleplay by Peter Dickinson, from his Changes novels, and Anna Home. One season of ten 15-minute episodes. Colour. / Nicky Gore (Williams) is an ordinary English teenager in an ordinary English household, doing her homework. Suddenly her family begins to destroy ...
Haldane, J B S
(1892-1964) UK biologist and author, brother of Naomi Mitchison, married to Charlotte Haldane (1926-1945); in active service in World War One, beginning 1914; an Indian citizen from 1961. His work in population genetics, and his sophistications of the theory of Evolution to properly incorporate Mendelian genetics, were of contemporary significance (see ...
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 ...