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Wednesday 14 May 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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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Death Ray, The
Russian silent film (1925; original title Luch Smerti). Goskino, Directed by Lev Kuleshov. Written by Vsevolod Pudovkin. Cast includes Vladimir Fogel, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Sergei Komarov, Leonid Obolensky, Porfiri Podobed, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Anya Stravinskaya. 125 minutes (but some of the film is missing, most notably the ending). Black and white. / Somewhere in the West a rebellion by factory workers has been crushed, with many killed. Then we ...
Stephen, A M
(1882-1942) Canadian poet and author who served in World War One. His Lost Race tale, The Kingdom of the Sun: A Romance of the Far West Coast (1927), which is set in the sixteenth century, describes the Haida tribe of Native Americans, relicts of an advanced civilization whose population – ethnically superior to the Native Americans surrounding it – is blond and blue-eyed, and ...
Whates, Ian
(1959- ) UK anthologist, publisher and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Flesh and Metal" as by I G Whates in Dream Magazine for March 1987; much of his best short fiction has been assembled as The Gift of Joy (coll 2009) and Growing Pains (coll 2013). The City of a Hundred Rows sequence, beginning with City of Dreams & Nightmare (2010), is Urban Fantasy set in ...
Hunting, Gardner
(1872-1958) US author, often for Young Adult readers, whose sf novel The Vicarion (1926; exp 1927) features the Vicarion, a Time Viewer directed toward the past, which plays back the permanent record of what has been. As a consequence, murders can be solved, politics cleaned up and the true events of history understood at last. [JC] see also: Machines. /
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 ...