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Thursday 5 October 2023
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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Secret Masters
A familiar aspect of sf Paranoia is the sense that small, anonymous and unreasonably powerful cabals – sometimes individuals (see Godgame) – secretly control or manipulate the world. Seemingly omnipotent groups of Villains are commonplace in both conspiracy theories and sf, the most famous instance being the Bavarian Illuminati whose alleged influence is deliriously recomplicated in Robert ...
Famous Films
Letter-size perfect-bound Cinema magazine printed on cheap newsprint. Publisher: Warren Publishing. Editor: Russ Jones. Three issues, all in 1964. / Famous Films was apparently the first US Media Magazine to adapt Horror and sf films in photonovel or fumetti form, a practice which was to become very common for some years from the mid-1970s. The ...
White, Richard Grant
(1822-1885) US editor, journalist and author whose The Fall of Man; Or, the Loves of the Gorillas [for full title see Checklist below] (1871 chap) as by A Learned Gorilla is a Satire on the Darwinian theory of Evolution as developed earlier the same year in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871); Grant's comic Satire consists of a lecture given in Africa by a ...
Countdown
Film (1967). William Conrad Productions. Directed by Robert Altman. Written by Loren Mandel, based on The Pilgrim Project (1964) by Hank Searls. Cast includes James Caan and Robert Duvall. 101 minutes cut to 73 minutes for UK. Colour. / A year later, Countdown would have looked like a Space Documentary, for it concerns the first landing on the ...
Froese, Edgar
German musician (1944-2015), most famous as part of Tangerine Dream. Froese released a number of solo albums, all instrumental electronica, although most with a distinctive science-fictional feel to them. Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1975) creates aural landscapes, possibly otherworldly, out of mellotron tones, pulsings, whirrings, dronings and other electronic noises. Many subsequent albums (for instance the four-volume Ambient Highway ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...