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Friday 18 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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Crane, Nathalia
(1913-1998) US poet, teacher and author, precociously active as a poet from childhood, beginning with the publication of her first collection, The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems (coll 1924 chap), which was much influenced by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886); Time magazine referred to her at this time as "The Baby Browning of Brooklyn". After publishing some further work she enjoyed a long career as an academic and political activist. Samuel R ...
Poisons
Assorted deadly substances form a subset of sf Drugs but often contain little intrinsic science-fictional interest: for example, "barbitide" in Samuel R Delany's Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the Dead City 1968) has effects resembling those of conventional arsenic, while the fast-acting "Divban rabbit-venom" mentioned in Roger Zelazny's ...
Dahlin, Allyson
(? - ) US author whose first novel, Cake Eater (2022), aspires to a comic retelling, in an Alternate History future a millennium hence, of the "romantic" life and love experiences of Marie Antoinette (1755-1793). [JC]
Sonne, Hans Christian
(1891-1971) Danish-born stockbroker, banker and author, in US from 1917. He is of sf interest for Enterprise Island: "Old Joe's Way" (1948), a tale for older children which begins as Prehistoric SF with Lost Race implications and evolves into a fictionalized history of the growth of capitalism. [JC]
Ashley, Mike
Working name of UK editor and researcher Michael Raymond Donald Ashley (1948- ), who has a special expertise in the history of magazine sf, fantasy and weird fiction; for this large body of significant work, he was given the Pilgrim Award for 2002. Ashley's first major work as an anthology editor was the four-volume The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, whose components are ...
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 ...