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Tuesday 22 April 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus
(1929-2022) German poet, critic, editor, publisher, translator and author who also wrote as by Elisabeth Ambras, Giorgio Pellizzi, Linda Quilt and Andres Thalmayr, active from around 1950. Primarily a poet, he wrote at least one adult novel, plus several for child and Young Adult audiences. Of the latter, Der Zahlenteufel (1997; trans by Michael Henry Heim as The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure 2000) ...
Hornblower in Space
Sea stories of the Napoleonic war era, especially the Horatio Hornblower sequence by C S Forester, have long appealed to sf fans. Obvious parallels with Spaceship voyages include the frail and crowded vessel in a lethal environment, an assumed need for tight naval discipline, and a profusion of technical Terminology. Walt Willis in his column "Fanorama" ...
Beese, P J
(1946-2020) US author whose sf novel, The Guardsman (1988), with Todd Cameron Hamilton, is an unremarkable example of interstellar-empire adventure sf; its nomination for the 1989 Hugo caused some stir, and there was evidence of block voting. When made aware of this, the authors requested that their novel be withdrawn from the ballot. [JC]
Perce, Elbert
(1831-1869) US translator and author whose Proto SF novel, Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages; Being an Account of his Marvelous Adventures in Kailoo, Hydrogenia and Ejario (1851), intriguingly utilizes the convention of the Fantastic Voyage to shift his tale back and forth among several narrative categories: genuinely speculative sf; mild-mannered Bildungsroman leading to marriage; interplanetary romance; the ...
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 ...