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Saturday 8 February 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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Gardner, Maurice B
(1905-1977) US machinist for a Maine railroad and author of the Bantan series of novels, set on a South Pacific Island, but directly influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan books he began reading at an early age; the series, whose sf content is borderline, begins with Bantan, God-Like Islander (1936; vt Bantan of the Islands 1957), includes a ...
Carr, Robert Spencer
(1909-1994) US author, who began publishing work of sf interest as a teenager with "The Composite Brain" for Weird Tales in March 1925; his first novel, The Rampant Age (1928), which is not fantastic, was also precocious. He was the author of one fantasy novel filled with an erotic nostalgia for death, The Room Beyond (1948), and of Beyond Infinity (coll 1951), four warmly realized stories set on Earth in the ...
Coblentz, Stanton A
(1896-1982) US author and traditionalist poet who wrote polemics in defence of his rather bad verse, beginning with his MA thesis, privately published as The Poetic Revival in America (1917). He began his career proper in the early 1920s with book reviews for New York papers, a volume of poems, The Thinker and Other Poems (coll 1923), and Modern American Lyrics (anth 1924). Of the many volumes of verse that followed – almost always published ...
Wallis, G McDonald
(1925-2011) US actress – under the names Hope Campbell and Kathy McDonald – and author; as by Hope Campbell, she wrote non-fantastic romance tales for about a decade from about 1943, and some Young Adult novels, including Looking for Hamlet: A Haunting at Deeping Lake (1987); as by Virginia Hughes, she wrote the Young Adult Peggy Lane Theatres Stories sequence of mild non-fantastic adventure tales; ...
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 ...