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Thursday 9 February 2023
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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Car Wars
Board and counter Wargame (1981). Steve Jackson Games (SJG). Designed by Steve Jackson, Chad Irby. / Car Wars is a game of "autoduelling" – combat between armed and armoured cars, motorcycles and trucks. It is set in a fragmented future America, in which oil and food crises have caused the near collapse of civilization. The game's Future History exemplifies many of the ...
Hale, John
(1926- ) UK film director, screenwriter, playwright and author – not to be confused with the historian John Hale, author of Great-Uncle Toby (1951), a Young Adult fantasy – who is of sf interest for The Paradise Man: A Black and White Farce (1969), a Near Future tale in which worldwide Future War is conducted between dominating Black ...
Clancy, Tom
(1947-2013) US author of Cold War thrillers and other similar works, at least one of which – Red Storm Rising (1986), in which war breaks out between NATO and the USSR after a mid-1980s Islamic terrorist attack against Soviet oil facilities – is a standalone Technothriller that can now be read as Alternate History. Of somewhat greater sf interest is the long ...
Weekley, Richard
(1945- ) US teacher, poet and author of an sf Satire, The Adventures of Chet Blake – Plastic Man (1975), in which a Near Future rock group upsets the applecart, exposing some of the flaws of the new world. [JC]
Wood, Wally
Working name of American artist Wallace A Wood (1927-1981), sometimes credited as Wallace Wood or simply Wood. After military service, the largely self-trained Wood received some instruction at New York's Cartoonists and Illustrators School in 1948 and did some minor work for newspaper Comic strips before shifting to comic books; one of his early collaborators was the young Harry Harrison, a fellow illustrator who later became 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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...