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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 ...
Brennert, Alan
(1954- ) US television producer and scriptwriter, and also author, essentially of fantasy and horror. His first genre publication was "Nostalgia Tripping" for Infinity Five (anth 1973) edited by Robert Hoskins. In his first novel, City of Masques (1978), actors scientifically programmed to become their roles run amok. Time and Chance (1990) is a kind of sf/horror tale in which two ...
Gardner, Gilson
(1869-1935) US author of A New Robinson Crusoe: A New Version of his Life and Adventures, With an Explanatory Note (1920), an updating of various Robinsonade tropes; the protagonist is becomes a castaway due to a plane crash; there are hints of Inventions in the air, which edge the text into sf. [JC]
Stang, Rev Ivan
Pseudonym of US film-maker, cultural critic, hoaxer, and author Douglas St Clair Smith (1953- ), taking the title "Reverend" from the Church of the SubGenius – an elaborately nonsensical spoof Religion he claimed not to have founded by himself. He edited The Book of the SubGenius (anth 1983), a Satire on other religions and cults in the form of densely packed clip art and surreal text relating the ...
Davis, Ellis James
(1850-1905) UK barrister who, mainly in the 1870s, was briefly active as an author. Pyrna: A Commune; Or, Under the Ice (1875) is a Lost World tale, set under a Swiss glacier; the Underground civilization there discovered occupies a geometrical City, where equality between the Sexes is observed. In Front of the World (1876 3vols), even more ...
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 ...