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Tuesday 8 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Coombs, Charles I
(1914-1994) US author, usually known as Chick Coombs, who in 1941 modelled John Carter of Mars for John Coleman Burroughs's Sunday-newspaper comics strip of that name (see Edgar Rice Burroughs). Coombs's written output was almost exclusively of nonfiction books for Young Adult readers, a high proportion of them about flying. Of sf interest are at least two tales, ...
Hoffman, Lee
Working name of US sf fan and author Shirley Bell Hoffman (1932-2007), married (1956-1958) to Larry T Shaw. She first became known in the field for her two influential Fanzines, Quandry (30 issues 1950-1953) and Science-Fiction Five-Yearly (12 issues on the stated schedule, 1951-2006); the latter won the fanzine ...
Hall, Louisa
(1982- ) US academic, poet and author who is of sf interest for her second novel, Speak (2015), a multi-voiced tale moderated and in part iterated by AIs, who have come to something like self-consciousness through a radical concept underlying their development: that consciousness is not generated by number-crunching but through the centripetal magnetism through time of storytelling. The figures depicted range from a young seventeenth ...
Lazarus, Henry
(1855-1922) UK author, active in the 1890s, not to be confused with the well-known clarinetist, Henry Lazarus (1815-1895); his Future History, The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century: A Prospective History (1894), caused some stir through its advocacy of a welfare state, which the text pictures as following on from a revolution by the forces of Labour led by the redoubtable Carlyle Democritus. [JC]
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 ...