SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 11 December 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 9 December 2024
Sponsor of the day: Janine G Stinson
Westall, William
(1835-1903) UK author and journalist, resident for much of his life in Switzerland, where he served as foreign correspondent for The Times of London; he also travelled in South America and elsewhere. The explorer protagonist of The Phantom City: A Volcanic Romance (1886) travels by Balloon to a Lost-World race of Incans hidden in a Guatemalan volcano, where they maintain a pre-Conquest level of civilization. ...
Ape Man, The
US film (1943). Banner Productions. Directed by William Beaudine. Written by Barney Sarecky, supposedly based on Karl Brown's story "They Creep in the Dark" (claims that this appeared in The Saturday Evening Post remain unverified). Cast includes Louise Currie, Wallace Ford, Henry Hall, Emil Van Horn, Ralph Littlefield, Bela Lugosi and Minerva Urecal. 64 minutes. Black and white. / Dr. Randall (Hall) ...
Dean, Frederic Alva
(circa 1860-1936) US author of a Lost Race novel, The Heroines of Petoséga (1889), which traces the history of the survivors of an ancient Disaster which destroys pre-Attic Greece in about 1000 BCE, and who found the exquisite city of Petoséga on what is now known as Mackinac Island in present-day Michigan. But Petoséga is destroyed more than once by a vast ...
dos Santos, Carlos
(1962- ) Teacher and author of, as far as we can establish, the first science fiction novel published in Mozambique. This is A Quinta Dimensão ["The Fifth Dimension"] (2006), published in Portuguese and reissued (again in Portuguese) in 2010. Both editions have coloured illustrations on the covers. This sf romance deals, as the title suggests, with the fifth Dimension. Here it provides a means of travel in an expanding ...
Holford, Castello N
(1845-1905) US author of Aristopia: A Romance-History of the New World (1895), an Alternate History, a very early example of the form in English: the first white settlers in Virginia, having discovered an enormous deposit of gold, use their wealth to ensure the success of their colony, which they turn into a Utopia destined to take over America in the twentieth century. [JC]
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 ...