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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 ...
Newman, Paul S
(1924-1999) US author who scripted the first Tom Corbett comic strip, based on Tom Corbett: Space Cadet (1950-1955) and published on 9 September 1951. His novel Alien Missile Threat (1967) is an unremarkable Tie to the Television series The Invaders (1967-1968). His only recorded short sf is "Hill of the Flashing Light" in ...
Comyns, Barbara
Working name of UK author Barbara Comyns-Carr (1907-1992), whose style's transfixed faux-naive simplicity intensifies the tone of pregnant magic realism (see Fabulation) that marks much of her work. In Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954), a small isolated village is uncannily disrupted first by a flood then by a plague (the latter all the more uncanny in that it seems not to be Pandemic but entirely local) [for ...
Sturgeon, Theodore
(1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new first name; Argyll (1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter Sturgeon wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these name changes; partner of Jayne Tannehill 1976-1985. Certainly Sturgeon early suffered or ...
Challenging Destiny
Canadian Small Press low-paying magazine of science fiction and fantasy, published by Crystalline Sphere Publishing, St Marys, Ontario; edited throughout by David M Switzer, initially with Graham D Wall (issues 1 and 2) and then Robert P Switzer (#3-#12). It ran for 25 issues between May 1997 to December 2007, as a Print Magazine until #17 (December 2003) and thereafter as an ...
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 ...