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Friday 14 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.
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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Smith, James V, Jr
(? - ) US author of horror novels with background Horror in SF hints of explanatory structures. The Beast sequence beginning with Beastmaker (1988) features a Monster created by (it may be) a Mad Scientist, or erroneously. The Lurker (1988) features a similar creatures, as does Almost Human (1990), which is set ...
Lukes, Steven
(1941- ) UK academic and author, of sf interest for his only novel, The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas (1995), an abstractly Satirical anatomy of Utopias based on the heuristic premise that several ideal societies exist in the Alternate World here depicted. The protagonist, some of whose life and arguments explicitly reflect the eventful ...
Stacy, Ryder
Joint pseudonym of Jan Stacy and Ryder Syvertsen (whom see for titles), and solo pseudonym, after 1985, of the latter. [JC]
MacLean, Alistair
(1922-1987) Scottish author whose novels are mostly – like The Guns of Navarone (1957) – well-crafted action adventures, usually set at least in part at sea. The Dark Crusader (1961; vt The Black Shrike 1961) and The Satan Bug (1962), both as by Ian Stuart, are Cold War thrillers which make use of sf McGuffins, though in the latter the eponymous manufactured virus ...
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 ...