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Monday 24 January 2022
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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Green, Nunsowe
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of the sf discussion novel, A Thousand Years Hence; Being Personal Experiences as Narrated by Nunsowe Green ... (1882) [see Checklist for full subtitle]. Though the featured tour of the future turns out to have been a dream, the novel invokes a wide range of sf notions, from ESP to Genetic Engineering to interplanetary travel to Terraforming. [JC]
Jones, Ewart C
(? - ) UK author whose How Now Brown Cow? (1947) is a rural spoof with some fantasy elements, and in whose Head in the Sand (1958), set in a grey Near Future Britain, revolutionaries fail to dislodge the Soviets who have occupied the country. [JC]
Kingston, Agnes Kinloch
(1824-1913) UK linguist and translator, married from 1853 until his death to W H G Kingston, who published her translations of Jules Verne and Johann Wyss under his own name without acknowledgement; for some later work she signed herself Agnes D Kingston. These translations, which have been properly faulted for expurgations and inaccuracies, were typical of Victorian workmanship in this field; she was by no means the worst offender. [JC]
Canning, Victor
(1911-1986) UK author whose surname at birth was Cannings but whose whole family changed their name to Canning. He began his career in 1929 with some unidentified anonymous stories for Boys' Magazine and The Startler; his first books were "cozy picaresques" like Mr Finchley Discovers His England (1934), which verge on the fantastic but do not quite reach that deep. Two of his many later thrillers are borderline sf: in The Finger of Saturn (1973) a group of individuals who claim to have come ...
Webster, Henry Kitchell
(1875-1932) US author in whose sf novel, The Sky-Man (1910), a young soldier and inventor, having built a winged lighter-than-air single-person Airship, is flying it in the Arctic where he encounters a young woman searching for her missing father, who has indicated via message in a bottle that he has discovered a clement Lost World. He saves her from rape, and the tale ends happily. [JC]
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 November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...