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Monday 9 December 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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Wilkins, John
(1614-1672) UK philosopher who served as the Bishop of Chester. He wrote no fiction, but was one of the first popularizers of science and a propagandist for scientific progress whose speculative nonfiction is remarkable. The nonfiction The Discovery of a New World; Or, a Discourse Tending to Prove, That 'tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in the Moone (1638), which seems to reflect a reading of Johannes Kepler's Somnium ...
Nichols, Robert [2]
(1919-2010) US poet and author of the Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai sequence describing in fictionalized terms a pacific, agricultural, myth-driven Utopia, beginning with Red Shift: An Introduction to Nghsi-Altai (1977) with Peter Schumann and ending with Exile: Book IV of Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai (1978). From the Steam Room: A Satire of Global Perspective on the Financial Ruin of New York (1993) is a ...
Palmer, Dexter
(1974- ) US author whose first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010), a Steampunk tale set in an Alternate World version of America where the protagonist, enduring luxurious imprisonment in a zeppelin floating above a fantasticated City while remembering – in something like a dream state – his beloved Miranda and her father Prospero, the latter ...
Senarens, Luis Philip
(1863-1939) US editor, publishing aide and author. Under at least twenty-seven pseudonyms he wrote perhaps 2000 stories, mostly boys' fiction, beginning in his teens. In later life, when that market declined, he served as managing editor for the Tousey publications, edited the weekly Moving Picture Stories and wrote motion-picture scenarios. He remains best known for his early work. In 1879, under the House Name "Noname", he ...
Comic Inferno
A more or less self-explanatory item of Terminology coined by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), describing sf which cheerfully extracts Satire or outright black Humour from a scenario rooted in Dystopia. Examples cited by Amis include Anthony Boucher's ...
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 ...