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Tuesday 18 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 17 February 2025
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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 ...
Gernsback, Hugo
Working and perhaps eventually legal name of Luxembourg-born US inventor, author, editor and publisher Hugo Gernsbacher (1884-1967), who emigrated to America in 1904 to market his various minor inventions. A successful catalogue of radio parts led to a focus on publishing magazines, mostly dealing with practical science or sf, though his most popular magazine may have been the mildly scandalous Sexology. Gernsback made important contributions to the growth and development of modern sf as ...
FTL
Initialism, often employed in sf Terminology, for Faster Than Light – as for example in FTL Spaceship. Fritz Leiber's use of the term in "The Enchanted Forest" (October 1950 Astounding) may be the first printed appearance. [DRL] see also: Sublight. /
Harrow, Alix E
(1989- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Whisper in the Weld" in Shimmer for November 2014; The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage (2016 ebook), a novelette, is set in an Alternate World version of a reality where the land itself organically intertwines with the maps that attempt to draw it; she won a Hugo award for "A Witch's ...
Szpara, K M
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Ordinary Souls" in Shimmer for January 2013; his useful anthology Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (anth 2016), was meant to be the first of an annual series, though no further volumes have appeared. Szpara is primarily of sf interest for his first novel, Docile (2020), set in a ...
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 ...