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Monday 17 February 2025
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 17 February 2025
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Greer, Tom
Working name of Irish surgeon Thomas Greer (1846/1847-1904) for his writing; he lived in the UK from about 1880. In his A Modern Daedalus (1885) an Irish lad invents a one-man flying device (see Inventions; Transportation) which straps to the shoulders. The UK Government attempts to persuade him to use it against Ireland. Though he longs simply for peace, UK military action forces him onto the side of the ...
Croatia
Croatian sf in its infancy (especially after the nineties) is not very different from the East European fiction and we can compare it to the Russian school of fiction. In the early days of sf in Croatia, writers dealt with adventurous and utopian themes, but later their focus shifted more to existential and social issues, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Croatian Patriotic war in the nineties; typically they now wrote about the life of the "little man" who is repressed by ...
Freedman, Carl
(1951- ) US academic, literary theorist and author, James F Cassidy Professor of English at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge). He began to publish essays of genre interest with "Style, Fiction, Science Fiction: The Case of Philip K Dick" in Styles of Creation, Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds (anth 1992) edited by Eric S Rabkin and George Slusser, and ...
Candler, Edmund
(1874-1926) UK travel journalist, professor of English (in Darjeeling, India) and author, mostly on Indian subjects from a point of view unfriendly to Indian aspirations; during an 1888 expedition to Lhasa, Tibet, he lost a hand during a dispute, an experience incorporated into his The Unveiling of Lasa (1905). His sf novel, The Dinosaur's Egg (1925), makes explicit references to Don Quixote in its description of an obsessed explorer, who discovers ...
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 ...