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Friday 17 January 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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Mainstream Writers of SF
This discussion should be read in conjunction with several others as part of a pattern of reasoning that is most clearly presented in Definitions of SF, Fabulation, Genre SF, History of SF, Magic Realism, Postmodernism and SF, Proto SF and ...
Commander Battle and the Atomic Sub
US Comic (1954-1955). Titan Publishing Co/American Comics Group. 7 issues. Artists include Ken Landau, Sheldon Moldoff and Ogden Whitney. Scriptwriters include Richard Hughes. 36 pages. Each issue was dominated by a 2 or 3 part Atomic Sub story, broken up by brief fiction and non-fiction pieces; from #3 there would also be a 5-7 page Atomic Sub story focusing on one of the Commandos, except for #7, which concerns one of the sub's guards: of these, only the "Doc" ...
Lott, S Makepeace
Working name of UK author Stanley Makepeace-Lott (1920-1991), whose Escape to Venus (1956) is an Orwell-influenced Dystopian view of a Venus colony established sixty years after the outbreak of World War Three in 1980. [JE]
Toys in SF
Extrapolations of children's Toys are encountered from time to time in science fiction, often to sinister effect. The ironic reversal of innocence that makes malign Children in SF such an effective trope extends to their dangerous, untrustworthy or subversive playthings. / The toys dumped into the twentieth century via Time Travel in Henry Kuttner's "Mimsy Were the ...
Fawcett, Edgar
(1847-1904) US author, known primarily for his work outside the sf field. Most of his 40 or so novels belong to the realist school associated with his contemporary William Dean Howells, but (like Howells) Fawcett also wrote fantastic works. He provided a manifesto for a species of fiction which he called "realistic romance", which is very similar to some Definitions of SF: "Stories where the astonishing and peculiar ...
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 ...