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Thursday 10 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Walker, Jerry
(? -? ) US author of the Lawrence Marley Sequence of Near Future thrillers comprising Mission Accomplished: A Novel of 1950 (1947) and A Date with Destiny (1949); Colonel Marley, chief of an American counter-intelligence unit, defends his native land from foreign intrigues as the Cold War begins to intensify and World War Three ...
Reed, Kit
(1932-2017) US author – her name was legally changed from Lilian Craig Reed – as well known for her work outside sf and fantasy as for her prolific output within the water margins of modern Fantastika. Her fluency among the modes of the modern was remarkable [all her titles are therefore given in the Checklist below]. She wrote one horror novel, Blood Fever (1986), as by Shelley Hyde, and three detections – Gone ...
Atlantis
The legend of Atlantis, an advanced civilization on a continent (or large Island) in the middle of the Atlantic which was overwhelmed by some geological cataclysm, has its earliest extant source in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias (circa 350 BCE). The legend can be seen as a parable of the Fall of Man, and writers who have since embroidered the story have generally shown less interest in the cataclysm itself than ...
Van der Poel, W I
(1909-1987) Working name of American artist Washington Irving Van der Poel Jr, who sometimes included the "Jr" in his name. While there is not an abundance of biographical information about this artist, Van der Poel is known to have been working for Macfadden Publications at the time of his US Army draft in 1942; according to an obituary he also worked for the magazines Fortune and Time. He was the art director for H L Gold'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 ...