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Thursday 5 December 2024
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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Ehrmann, Max
(1872-1945) US lawyer and author, most famous for "Desiderata", a prose poem whose copyright was registered by Ehrmann on 3 January 1927 which sets down a range of homilies about living the good life; it was published in various formats (including many 1960s and 1970s posters, and a spoken recitation as "Spock Thoughts" on a 1968 album by Leonard Nimoy) and is often wrongly sourced to a seventeenth-century tombstone inscription or Latin text. Of sf interest is Ehrmann's A Fearsome Riddle ...
Whates, Ian
(1959- ) UK anthologist, publisher and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Flesh and Metal" as by I G Whates in Dream Magazine for March 1987; much of his best short fiction has been assembled as The Gift of Joy (coll 2009) and Growing Pains (coll 2013). The City of a Hundred Rows sequence, beginning with City of Dreams & Nightmare (2010), is Urban Fantasy set in ...
Simpson, Helen
(1897-1940) Australian playwright and author, mostly in the UK from April 1914; she was employed as a message decoder in World War One. In 1919 she founded the Oxford Women's Dramatic Society, but was sent down by the university for appearing on stage with a man. The Baseless Fabric (coll 1925) assembles supernatural and weird fiction; Mumbudget (coll 1928) assembles fairy tales. John Dee's recounting of ...
Goodman, Dickie
(1934-1989) US record producer who with his aspiring songwriter friend Bill Buchanan (1930-1996) launched both their careers with the comic novelty record "The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2" (1956). Inspired by Orson Welles's radio broadcast War of the Worlds (1938), it is credited with being the first record to use the "break-in" technique, which evolved into modern-day sampling. Buchanan and Goodman ...
Scanner Darkly, A
Film (2006). Warner Independent Pictures in association with Thousand Words presents a Section Eight/Detour Filmproduction/3 Arts Entertainment production. Written and directed by Richard Linklater; based on A Scanner Darkly (1977) by Philip K Dick. Cast includes Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson, Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder. 96 minutes. Colour. / Seven years in the future, undercover narcotics officers run scanner surveillance on ...
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 ...