SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 8 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.
Site updated on 2 December 2024
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
Garn, Jake
Working name of US politician and author Edwin Jacob Garn (1932- ), a Republican, US Senator for Utah 1974-1993. During his tenure, he flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1985, the first sitting member of the US Congress to engage personally in Space Flight. His sf novel, Night Launch (1989) with Stephen Paul Cohen of the Brookings Institute, posits a Near Future neo-Nazi terrorist ...
Wyatt, Horace
(1876-1954) UK author, almost exclusively on cars and the motoring industry; his spoofish Satire, Malice in Kulturland (1914 chap), bases its mild deprecations (uttered just as World War One begins) on Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books, with W Tell's illustrations executed in the mode of the recently deceased John Tenniel (1820-1914). Wyatt is at his sharpest in his references to ...
Walker, Alice
(1944- ) US author best known for novels like The Color Purple (1982), exploring from a Feminist perspective the fate of being Black in America. One of the protagonists of The Temple of My Familiar (1989), an extremely long Fabulation, is immortal (see Immortality) or has suffered numerous incarnations (see ...
Janin, Jules
(1804-1874) French author, active from the 1820s, who first came to prominence for L'Âne mort et la Femme guillotinée (1829; trans Terry Hale as The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman 1993), a very early example of what would become known as the conte cruel [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. In its counterintuitive lightheartedness – the plot of the tale is ...
Boyczuk, Robert
(1956- ) Canadian teacher of computer science and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Jazz Fantasia" in On Spec for Winter 1993, most of his subsequent work being horror, much of it (including his first story under the vt "Jazz Threnody") being assembled as Horror Story and Other Horror Stories (coll 2009). He is of sf interest primarily for Nexus (2004 ebook; vt Nexus: Ascension ...
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 ...