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Thursday 16 January 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.
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Horton, Rich
(1959- ) US software engineer working in the aerospace industry; columnist, reviewer and editor from the late 1990s, when he contributed reviews of short fiction to Tangent Online. In February 2002 he began a monthly review column in Locus – "Locus Looks at Short Fiction" – also specializing in stories gleaned from magazines and anthologies. In 2022 he announced that, after 20 years, this column would be retired; but that he ...
Wheeler, Paul
(1934- ) Jamaican-born UK author in whose The Friendly Persuaders (1968) benign-seeming Aliens from the planet Tarax appear in London and, offering promises of universal peace and free love, are soon swept into governmental power by a surge of popular acclaim. Inevitably this low-key Invasion conceals a more sinister agenda; one man's dogged resistance leads to revelations ...
Rejuvenation
The restoration of youth or a plausible semblance thereof has always seemed both more practical and more comfortable than the troublingly open-ended perspectives of Immortality. This entry deals chiefly with stories of bodily rejuvenation through Medicine and allied procedures: for the wilder sf tropes of transferring one's mind or brain to a new, young body or of growing inexorably younger by living backwards, see ...
Air Wonder Stories
US letter-size Pulp magazine, 11 issues, July 1929-May 1930, Stellar Publishing Corporation, edited by Hugo Gernsback, managing editor David Lasser. / This was a prompt comeback by Gernsback after the filing of bankruptcy proceedings against his Experimenter Publishing Company, with which he had founded Amazing Stories. Air Wonder Stories announced itself in its ...
Borden, William
(1938- ) US author whose sf Satire, Superstoe (1967), follows the eponymous Professor and his colleagues as they take over a Near Future America, transforming it into an enforced Utopia and imposing world peace through the use of nuclear weapons and germ warfare to convince their foes in Asia that they mean business; the effect, perhaps surprisingly, is sustainedly comic. ...
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 ...