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Saturday 13 August 2022
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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Jordan, Zack
(? - ) US Videogame creator, singer/songwriter and author who has released games and music as U S Killbotics. In his first novel, The Last Human (2020), which is set seemingly millennia hence, a young human is raised by a spiderlike being on a Space Habitat in orbit around a gas planet very far from Earth; young Sarya the Daughter is in fact the last human (see Last Man) alive, homo sapiens having been destroyed by galaxy-wide consensus, because we are ...
Brick Bradford
US Comic strip created by author William Ritt and artist Clarence Gray for King Features Syndicate. Brick Bradford appeared in 1933 as a Sunday page and daily strip, with the Sunday strip the more fantastic and futuristic. Gray's clean, economical style, together with Ritt's imaginative, purple prose, made Brick Bradford more than just an imitation of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which probably inspired it. Ritt was fired in 1948 for failing to keep deadlines, and died in 1971; Gray ...
Cayea, John
(? - ) US illustrator, seemingly active only from around 1970 to around 1981, his first cover being for Eando Binder's The Night of the Saucers (1971) from Belmont Books. Almost all of his following work was for Doubleday and Company, beginning with Jacqueline Lichtenberg's House of Zeor (1974). A Cayea cover soon became easy to recognize, often featuring a cleanly-executed, sometimes grotesque human or humanoid face or figure, usually centrally focused, ...
Pollard, Leslie
(? -? ) UK author of Menace: A Novel of the Near Future (1935), in which a Russian Invasion of the UK by air is mounted in the Near Future; and repulsed. [JC]
Star Frontiers
Role Playing Game (1982). Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Designed by Lawrence Schick, David Cook, others. / The universe of Star Frontiers evokes the romantic Space Opera of the 1950s, and particularly the settings of Andre Norton's sf juveniles, with additional elements drawn from the Star Wars film franchise. Its primary milieu is a region of space known as the Frontier, a partially explored area in which a United Planetary Federation made up of humans and members of three Alien races has ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...