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Friday 22 September 2023
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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Prehistoric SF
The late nineteenth-century growth of interest in primal humanity and its forebears (see Anthropology; Apes as Human; Evolution; Origin of Man) led to a broad category of imaginative fiction that might be termed Prehistoric Romance – colourful tales of primitives, freed even from the contemporary Lost-Race story's modest ...
Barnhouse, Perl T
(1877-1964) US farmer and author of a touristic sf novel, My Journeys with Astargo: A Tale of the Past, Present and Future (1952), in which spherical Antigravity-powered Spaceships are built – the initial Pioneerer being replaced by the Astargo – and various planets visited. As Damon Knight noted in In Search of Wonder: Essays on Modern Science Fiction ...
Mason, Daniel
(1976- ) US doctor and author who remains best known for his first novel, The Piano Tuner (2002), an ostensibly nonfantastic tale which follows the eponymous expert into the heart of 1886 Burma, where a chthonic myth-fomenting physician's piano must be tuned in order for him to bring harmony to conflicting factions. Analogies with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899; 1902) have been noted. Several of the ...
Clarke, Neil
(1966- ) US magazine editor and anthologist, best known for publishing and editing the award-winning Clarkesworld, which had its first issue as an Online Magazine October 2006 and is now available in print and other forms. The magazine won the Hugo for Semiprozine in 2010, 2011 and 2013; a ...
Green, Joseph
(1931- ) US author of sf and technical journalism who also worked for NASA, and who began publishing sf with "The Engineer" for New Worlds in February 1962. An Affair with Genius (coll 1969) assembles some of his better early work. Since 1989 he has also published short fiction in Analog, F&SF and other magazines as by Francis Marion Soty. Although many of his 70-plus ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...