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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 ...
Franklin, Stephen
(1922-1985) Canadian journalist and author, in whose Knowledge Park (1972), the Ontario-Quebec border north of Lake Abitibi houses a community of conjoined libraries in an edificial Keep known as the Igloos of Minerva which comes to contain the shared memories of human civilization. [JC]
Arnott, Robbie
(1989- ) Australian author whose first novel Flames (2018 ebook) is shaped as a Fantastic Voyage around the Island of Tasmania, without specific sf elements but dense with mythopoesis (see Fantastika). His second novel, The Rain Heron (2020), feeds some more orthodox sf elements into the mix; the tale, set in a ...
Womack, Jack
(1956- ) US author whose first five novels are stylish and potent exercises in a post-Cyberpunk urban idiom, and comprise the first instalments in the loose ongoing Terraplane series about the state of America; the sixth volume followed later. The sequence, reminiscent at points of the baroque New York detective fictions of Jerry Oster (1943- ), begins with Ambient (1987), set in the complexly ...
Debans, Camille
(1833-1910) French journalist and author, some of whose work, little yet translated, is sf. His Future War tale, Les Malheurs de John Bull (1884; trans as John Bull's Downfall 1884; vt John Bull's Misfortunes 1884); new trans Brian Stableford as The Misfortunes of John Bull in coll 2015 [for subtitles and further details see Checklist below], applies ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...