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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 ...
Egan, Greg
(1961- ) Australian author whose first novel, An Unusual Angle (1983), is a lightly surreal and science-fictional coming-of-age narrative. In the same year he began publishing work of clear genre interest with the Hard SF story "Artifact" (in Dreamworks, anth 1983, ed David King). Some other early shorts were fantasy; since the late 1980s, though, he has increasingly concentrated on sharply written sf with an ...
Manning, P L
(? - ) UK author, possibly pseudonymous, whose sf novel, The Destroyers (1958), is set on Mars, some time after Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear World War Three. After surviving for some time, the Genetically Engineered human remnant on Mars is driven back to Earth by the original Martians, who have suddenly returned to their home ...
Islands
Islands play a crucial role in imaginative fiction, providing geographical microcosms in which the consequences of various types of scientific or political hypotheses may be incarnated and made available for inspection by visitors from the world at large. In sf, the more intense moments of psychological uncovering, when the soul is bared to the prison of the world – "To be born is to be wrecked on an island," J M Barrie, introducing the 1913 edition of R M ...
Pratt, Tim
(1976- ) US author and poet, a graduate of Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop (East) who is currently a senior editor of Locus, for which he has written many reviews and obituaries. He also writes as T A Pratt and as by T Aaron Payton. Pratt began to publish fiction of genre interest with "53rd Annual Mantis Homecoming Dance" in ...
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 ...