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Friday 13 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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Comstock, Sarah
(? -1960) US author of regional tales mostly set in South Dakota whose last novel, The Moon Is Made of Green Cheese (1929), is of sf interest for its portrait of an astronomer (see Astronomy) responsible for some controversial findings and who engages in discussions with a mentor. His friends describe this mentor as an imaginary being; the astronomer's own description, if taken literally, would define his mentor as an ...
Abernathy, Robert
(1924-1990) US teacher and author who began to publish his short fiction with "Heritage" for Astounding in June 1942, and whose work – about 40 stories overall – appeared regularly in the sf magazines until 1956. During the 1940s, his most consistent market was Planet Stories, for which he wrote such stories as "Peril of the Blue World" (Winter 1942 Planet Stories), "Saboteur of Space" ...
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Film (1977; vt Nuclear Countdown). Geria Productions/Hemdale. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Written by Ronald M Cohen, Edward Huebsch, based on Viper Three by Walter Wager. Cast includes Melvyn Douglas, Charles Durning, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark and Paul Winfield. 146 minutes (cut to 122 minutes). Colour. / In this borderline-sf movie, set in 1981, escaped military prisoners headed by a renegade US general take over a nuclear ICBM ...
Dickinson, Seth
(? - ) US author, active from around 2010, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Traitor Baru Cormorant, her Field-General, and their Wounds" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies for 29 December 2011; much expanded, the story became the heart of his first novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2015; vt The Traitor 2015), which begins The Masquerade sequence for which he is ...
Malzberg, Barry N
(1939- ) US author. For about seven years he was extremely prolific in the sf field, very quickly producing some twenty sf novels and over 100 short stories, and much other work; his sf output slowed dramatically towards the end of the 1970s, when he became disenchanted with the genre for reasons explained in his collection of essays The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (coll 1982; much exp vt ...
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 ...