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Thursday 12 March 2026
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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Dickson, Lovat
(1902-1987) Australian-born publisher and author, in Canada or UK most of his life, half-brother of Gordon R Dickson; discovered and published Grey Owl (1888-1938), a Canadian-Indian sage famously unmasked after his death as a Scotsman named Archie Belaney; Dickson later wrote an interesting critical biography of H G Wells, H G Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969). [JC]
Bambaataa, Afrika
(1957- ). US musician and performer, sometimes credited with inventing "rap" as a musical style. Bambaataa's first single "Planet Rock" (1982) sampled "Trans-Europe Express" by Kraftwerk and added Bambaataa's vocals. Blending the designedly machinic, bloodless, north-European musical style with an impassioned African-American content, though perhaps a counter-intuitive step, was a brilliant move, and proved enormously influential on ...
Hideous Sun Demon, The
Film (1959; vt Blood on His Lips UK; vt Terror from the Sun; vt The Sun Demon). Clarke-King Enterprises/Pacific International Enterprises. Produced by Robert Clarke. Directed by Clarke and Tom Boutross. Written by E S Seeley Jr with additional dialogue by Doane R Hoag from an original idea by Clarke and Phil Hiner. Monster costume by Richard Cassarino (uncredited). Cast includes Robert Clarke, Fred La Porta, Patricia Manning, Nan Peterson, Peter Similuk and Patrick ...
Grisewood, R Norman
(1876-1923) UK-born author who emigrated to the USA in 1895 and was naturalized in 1921. He wrote two novels of sf interest. In Zarlah the Martian (1909), an instant Communications device allows an Identity Transfer between a Martian and Earthman, both of whom remain happy in their new bodies, though the Earthman – now long-lived, in an advanced society with Antigravity ...
Fiedler, Leslie A
(1917-2003) US critic and author, active from around 1940, whose piercing and mythopoeic views on the relationship between American culture and literature were first expressed in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey" (June 1948 Partisan Review; assembled in An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics, coll 1955), where he argued that the inexpressive but obvious homoerotic (often interracial) doublings embodied in so many American novels exposed a profound ...
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 ...