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Tuesday 8 October 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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
West, Nathanael
Pseudonym of US screenwriter and author Nathan Weinstein (1903-1940), perhaps best known for the non-fantastic Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), active from the early 1920s. He adapted his mother's maiden name on at least one occasion to sign himself Nathan von Wallenstein Weinsten (he added the "von"), but his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931 chap), was signed Nathanael West, as was everything he wrote from this point. Balso Snell, much indebted to ...
Stranger, The
Made-for-tv film (1973; vt Stranded in Space). Bing Crosby Productions for NBC-TV. Produced by Alan A Armer. Directed by Lee H Katzin. Written by Gerald Sandford from his original story. Cast includes Sharon Acker, Lew Ayres, Glenn Corbett and Cameron Mitchell. 100 minutes. Colour. / While on a Space Flight, astronaut Neil Stryker (Corbett) suffers an accident, reviving just in time to make a crash-landing from which he escapes with minor ...
Schwehn, Kaethe
(circa 1979- ) US academic, memoirist and author whose first novel, The Rending and the Nest (2018) is of sf interest for its depiction of a vast Disaster, the disappearance of 95% of the human race, though typically of the Mainstream Writer of SF this "inexplicable" vanishment is more metaphorical than actual. The survivors of this disaster, or some of them, occupy a remote ...
Jack the Ripper
This notorious nineteenth-century UK serial killer and mutilator – usually of female prostitutes – operated in the Whitechapel region of London, committing five murders in 1888 and perhaps others before and after, to a possible total of eleven. Never identified, the Ripper became and still remains gaslight-era London's major Icon of fear. The related literature of analysis and speculation ("Ripperology") is immense; we record ...
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 ...