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Sunday 12 January 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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Greenberg, Rosalind M
(1951- ) US author and editor who began to publish work of genre interest with "Namesake" as by Elizabeth Morton in The Arbor House Treasury of Horror and the Supernatural (anth 1981) edited by Martin H Greenberg, Barry N Malzberg and Bill Pronzini; she also published short fiction as by Rosalind Straley. She is best known for co-editing seven ...
Korzybski, Alfred
(1879-1950) Polish-born aristocrat (a count) sent after World War One to the USA as an artillery expert. He remained, and wrote a quasi-philosophical text, Science and Sanity (1933), which became the basic handbook of the General Semantics movement, later to prove so influential on the writer A E van Vogt and some others: George Hay was a UK devotee. With the support of a Chicago ...
Douglass, Ellsworth
Pseudonym of US real-estate speculator, insurance broker and author Elmer Dwiggins (1863-1933), whose enterprises (for which he was jailed in 1919-1920) took him to various countries around the turn of the century; his fiction, including his one sf novel, was written during these travels. His first story, "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (September 1899 Cassell's Magazine) with Edwin Pallander, describes a gyroscopically controlled ...
Tchaikovsky, Adrian
Working name of UK author Adrian Czajkowski (1972- ) who until recently has been best known for his long fantasy series, the Shadows of the Apt sequence beginning with Empire in Black and Gold (2008). The epic fantasy appearance of the series is modified, though not entirely transformed, by the fact that all the races in the long unfolding tale are insectile, or have at the very least insect-like characteristics, which intuitively befits the ...
Planetfall
Videogame (1983). Infocom. Designed by Steve Meretzky. Platforms: AppleII, Atari8, DOS, PCBoot, TRS80 (1983); Mac (1984); AtariST, C64 (1985); Amiga, Amstrad (1986). / The text Adventure game Planetfall is a mildly comic Space Opera, remembered largely for the strong emotional reactions it evoked in many players. At 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 ...