SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 15 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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Disch, Thomas M
(1940-2008) US author, raised in Minnesota but for many years intermittently resident in New York where, before becoming a full-time writer in the mid-1960s, he worked in an advertising agency and in a bank; he subsequently lived (and set several tales) in the UK, Turkey, Italy and Mexico, before returning to Manhattan, where much of his significant work is set; he was the partner of Charles Naylor from 1969 until the latter's death in 2005. Disch began ...
Oxenham, John
Pseudonym of UK lay figure in the Congregationalist Church, poet, editor and author William Arthur Dunkerley (1852-1941); he was co-founder, with Robert Barr of The Idler. Many of his works – some of them now-unread fantasies – served to advance his religious convictions. Two novels are of sf interest: ...
Walsh, M O
(? - ) US author whose first book, The Prospect of Magic (coll of linked stories 2010), presents a sequence of life stories, some of them Tall Tales [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], that unpack the lives of a crew of colourful carnies who have decided to remain in Fluker, Louisiana, after The World Famous Ploofop Travelling Carnival, which had housed and ...
Nogaret, François-Félix
(1740-1831) French bureaucrat and author, intermittently prolific from around 1770 to 1830; he is of sf interest for Le Miroir des événements actuels, ou la belle au plus offrant, Histoire à deux visages ["The Mirror of Present Events, or, Beauty to the Highest Bidder: A Two-Faced Tale"] [for various versions see Checklist below] (1790 chap; trans Brian Stableford as "The Mirror of Present Events; Or, Beauty to the ...
Rays
One of sf's trademark Clichés is the use of rays – of any colour or none at all, inhabiting the known electromagnetic spectrum or imaginary new spectra, or entirely based on Pseudoscience – for all manner of showy and/or narratively convenient effects. Exotic rays give ambiguous aid in Medicine or spawn Mutants, but above all they provide glamorous ...
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 ...