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Friday 29 September 2023
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 25 September 2023
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Widescreen Baroque
An occasionally quoted critical term coined by Brian Aldiss to denote Space Opera at its most grandiose: what might also be termed space grand opera. In his introduction to the 1964 Faber edition (as The Paradox Men) of Charles L Harness's Flight into Yesterday (May 1949 Startling; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men ...
Choose Your Own Adventure
Gamebook series (from 1979). Bantam Books, Chooseco. Designed by Edward Packard, R A Montgomery. / Choose Your Own Adventure is a line of "variable plot" or "multiform" books for younger readers; the path taken through the text is determined entirely by choices made by the protagonist, without the Role Playing Game-like rule-based mechanics used in such series as ...
Darbyshire, Peter
(1967- ) Canadian journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Roadkill Man" for On Spec in March 1995. Most of his work under his own name – including three novels, Please (2003), The Warhol Gang (2010) and I'd Never Been Shot for Real Before (2014 ebook) – presents hallucinated but essentially nonfantastic visions of urban life, though the descriptions of ...
Smith, Stephanie A
(1959- ) US academic and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Blue Heart" in Asimov's for November 1982, and whose first novels – the Snow-Eyes sequence comprising Snow-Eyes (1985) and The Boy Who Was Thrown Away (1987) – were Planetary Romances for the Young Adult market. The protagonist of the first ...
Big Little Books
Compact children's book format inaugurated in late 1932 by the Whitman Publishing Company (Racine, Wisconsin) with The Adventures of Dick Tracy (graph 1932) and widely imitated by other publishers. A typical Big Little Book had a width of 3 5/8 inches and a height of 4½ inches, with 432 pages making a fat little volume 1½ inches thick (roughly 9.2 cm x 11.4 cm x 3.8cm). Every page of text was faced by a full-page captioned picture. Many ...
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 consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...