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Wednesday 18 September 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.
Site updated on 17 September 2024
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Outer Reaches
US print-on-demand SF Magazine published by Black Matrix Publishing, Grants Pass, Oregon and edited by Guy Kenyon. Only one issue, Winter (January) 2010, letter size. The cover, depicting armed soldiers, sets the tone for this magazine, which promised stories set on far distant worlds and has a strong militaristic tone (see Military SF) though stories also dealt with the exploration of new worlds and posed some interesting ...
Simenon, Georges
(1903-1989) Belgian-born author, in France 1925-1945 and 1955-1957, famous over his enormously prolific career mainly for the seventy-five or so Maigret novels about a Paris-based police inspector, but also for what he called romans durs: 100 or more savagely intense studies of class-ridden men – women hardly feature as protagonists in his work – who have been driven to and beyond their psychological limits, and who break. Of these novels, ...
Dixon, Charles
UK author, problematically identified as Charles Dixon (1858-1926), an ornithologist of some renown. The sf novel written by him, or by some other Charles Dixon or by an author using this common name as a pseudonym, is Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour (1895), a boys' tale featuring the interplanetary exploits of some young protagonists who travel to Mars – inhabited by giant Martians – via an electric Spaceship. ...
Phantom, The
African jungle-dwelling Comics Superhero partially inspired by Tarzan and created by Lee Falk – also the creator of Mandrake the Magician – as the star of a daily newspaper strip whose first appearance was on 17 February 1936 and which continues to be widely syndicated today. At the outset the strip was briefly drawn by Falk ...
Baker, Sharon
(1938-1991) US author of three Planetary Romances – all set on the planet Naphar – whose richly layered Fantasy surface conceals much sf underpinning: Naphar's poisonous environment has an sf explanation; the planet has been colonized by humans who interbred with the native race; and contacts with galactic civilization remain active. Quarreling, They Met the Dragon (1984) describes the coming to ...
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 ...