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Tuesday 18 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 ...
Phantasm
Film (1978). New Breed. Directed, produced, written and photographed by Don Coscarelli. Cast includes Michael Baldwin, Reggie Bannister, Angus Scrimm and Bill Thornbury. 90 minutes, cut to 89 minutes. Colour. / At the independent, low-budget, exploitation end of the movie market, small miracles sometimes occur that could not take place inside a major studio. Phantasm is one such, a spirited blend of Horror, surrealism and sf, in which the ...
Gibson, Joe
(1924-2006) US illustrator and author whose involvement in Fandom began a little earlier than the publication of his first work of genre interest, "I Like You, Too –" (October 1948 Thrilling Wonder Stories; 2023 ebook). He also wrote as by John Bridger and Carlton Furth; his illustrations seem to have appeared only in Fanzines. His work, mostly Space Opera, mostly ...
Hodgson, John
(1881-1936) UK inventor and author, whose vision of various forms of Utopia via Time Travel, The Time-Journey of Dr. Barton. An Engineering and Sociological Forecast based on Present Possibilities (1929 chap), attractively posits a world delivered from excesses of Technology by a cadre of technocrats; The Great God WASTE (1933) is a less-fictionalized disquisition on some of ...
Badger Books
The main imprint of John Spencer and Co, used by that firm on almost all their books from about the beginning of 1955 through 1967, when the imprint was terminated. John Spencer and Co. itself was founded in 1946, incorporated in 1956 and eventually dissolved in 1983; like several other UK firms (e.g., Curtis Warren), it specialized in the production of purpose-written paperback originals in various popular genres, though the early 1950s saw some emphasis on ...
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 ...