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Tuesday 8 July 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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Battle of Dorking
Probably the most important and influential of early Future War stories, George T Chesney's anonymously published novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (May 1871 Blackwood's Magazine; 1871 chap) conveyed a dire warning against British jingoist complacency with its depiction of a surprise Invasion by an unnamed country (ie Germany) whose secret ...
Komroff, Manuel
(1890-1974) US author of I, the Tiger (1933), a tale Equipoisal between fantasy and sf: the narration, from the point-of-view of a caged tiger, is fantasy; the Hollywood frame (see California), in which a "superfilm" is exorbitantly described, pushes some elements of Satire beyond the mundane. [JC]
Cabet, Étienne
(1788-1856) French lawyer, philosopher, utopian socialist and author, best known for the narrative Utopia, Voyage et Aventures de Lord Villiam Carisdall en Icarie (1839 2vols; vt Voyage en Icarie: roman philosophique et social 1842; trans Leslie J Roberts as Travels in Icaria 2003) [for more details see Checklist below]. The eponymous Lord Carisdall, a member of the British nobility, travels by ship (the journey takes four ...
Gustafson, Jon
(1945-2002) US art and artbook appraiser, expert in sf art, active sf fan (see Fandom) and author, married to V E Mitchell. He began publishing professional fiction of genre interest with "Beast" in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume II (anth 1986) edited by Algis Budrys, though he had earlier begun and continued for many years the "Gimlet Eye" column (1975-1993) about ...
Thomson, David
(1941- ) UK author, in the US from 1975; best known for his nonfiction studies of film, including the well-known A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (1975), which has been expanded several times; he has also written critical works on film noir, including America in the Dark: Hollywood and the Gift of Unreality (1977) and Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts (1997). A similar focus is reflected in his ...
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 ...