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Friday 17 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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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WSFA Journal
US club Fanzine, first series 1965-1977 edited by Don Miller; second series, following a hiatus, 1988-current under various editors. US quarto (letter-size) format. Published for the Washington SF Association based in Washington, District of Columbia. / Besides items relating to WSFA and local Fandom, the WSFA Journal contained articles of general sf interest, including in its early years a regular column by Thomas Burnett ...
Kipple
Term originating in Fandom, denoting useless or unwanted household junk and ephemera which seems to reproduce itself at the expense of non-kipple possessions – a low-key, domestic manifestation of Entropy (which see). The word spread from Fan Language into popular culture via the novels of Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) ...
Soft Sciences
In academic slang and sf Terminology, the soft sciences are in the main the social sciences, those which deal mainly with human affairs – very often the sciences that require little or no hardware for their carrying out. (Most would claim Biology and subsidiary fields – e.g., Clones and Genetic Engineering – as hard sciences [see ...
Townsend, John
(1924- ) UK author of the Andy and Tom series of Children's SF Space Operas comprising The Rocket-Ship Saboteurs (1959) and A Warning to Earth (1960). He should not be confused with John Rowe Townsend. [JC]
Haddad, Hubert
(1947- ) Tunisian-born poet, playwright and author, in France from 1950, active as a poet from the mid-1960s. His fiction is generically various, and may often be defined in terms of its diverse and ambitious transactions between myth and the quotidian (see Fantastika). He is of specific sf interest for Corps désirable (2015; trans Alyson Waters as Desirable Body 2018), whose protagonist, after suffering ...
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 ...