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Saturday 14 December 2024
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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John, Elton
(1947- ) UK singer-songwriter, prolific and enduringly popular. A characteristic John composition is a short, poppy love song, but he has recorded a small number of sf tracks, including: "Bad Side of the Moon" (on 11-17-70, 1971) about a remorseful convict in a Prison situated on the lunar dark side; "Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long Long Time)" (on Honky Château, 1972), a plaintive version of Ray ...
Barren, Charles
(1913-1999) UK teacher and author, best known for historical romances; co-author with R Cox Abel of Trivana I (1966), in which an overpopulated Earth uses the titular Spaceship (powered by an Ion Drive) to establish a Venus colony (see Colonization of Other Worlds). Barren also scripted a sf drama, "The Planet of ...
Crawford, Betty Anne
(1952- ) US author who published fantasy novels [see Checklist below] as by Hendra Benoit, Lee Creighton, Maxwell Hurley and Sal Liquori; under her own name, she published her only sf novel, The Bushido Incident (1992), which depicts a twenty-first-century Earth dominated by Japanese corporations while Aliens from outer space begin to destabilize this system. [JC]
Levitin, Sonia
(1934- ) German-born teacher and author, in the US from 1938 (though many members of her family died in the Final Solution), much of whose work is designed for younger children, and many of whose Young Adult novels are nonfantastic. Those of sf interest include The Cure (1999), set in the twenty-fifth century, a Utopian world which punishes excessively deviant behaviour by giving nonconformists, via ...
Steffanson, Con
A House Name used by Avon Books for the initial four books of their sequence of Ties to the Flash Gordon franchise: Ron Goulart wrote the first three of these and Bruce Cassiday the fourth. Two further titles appeared as by Cassiday's own pseudonym Carson Bingham. [DRL]
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 ...