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Monday 10 February 2025
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.
Site updated on 10 February 2025
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Sinclair, Carl
(? - ) New Zealand-born UK author, for whose sf novel Sixth Cycle (2014) with Darren Wearmouth, see his collaborator. In his second novel, Escalation Force (2015), a deadly Weapon is discovered in an Underground cache dating back to World War Two. [JC]
Cyborgs
The term "cyborg" is a contraction of "cybernetic organism" and refers to the product of human/machine hybridization. It was coined by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline in their article "Cyborgs in Space" (September 1960 Astronautics p26), which proposed "Altering man's bodily functions to meet the requirements of extraterrestrial environments". Early sf uses of the term appear in the Comic Space Man (1962) and Frank ...
Tucker, James B
(1922- ) UK teacher and author of Not an Earthly Chance (1970), a Space Opera for Robert Hale Limited in which Aliens from the Moon plan to take over our world. [JC/DRL]
Dornbierer, Manú
(circa 1932- ) Mexican author and painter, better known for her work as a journalist, a field where she has received some awards. In the late 1960s, Dornbierer began to publish short stories, mostly Fantasy, always very stylish, well-written and constructed pieces. In 1968, her short story "La grieta" ["The Crack"], later included in the collection Después de Samarkanda ["After Samarkand"] (coll ...
Boys from Brazil, The
Film (1978). Producer Circle. Directed Franklin J Schaffner. Written by Heywood Gould, based on The Boys from Brazil (1976) by Ira Levin. Cast includes Jeremy Black, James Mason, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck. 125 minutes. Colour. / Like the novel on which it is based, this is an absurd but entertaining concoction of pulp-thriller conventions with some rather interesting scientific conjecture about environment and heredity. Joseph ...
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 ...