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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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de Bodard, Aliette
(1982- ) US-born software engineer and author, her background being French and Vietnamese, in France from the age of one; her first language is French but she has always written in English. She began to publish work of genre interest with "A Warrior's Death" in Shimmer for Spring 2006, and has rapidly come into prominence for her short fiction: "The Shipmaker" (November 2010 Interzone) which won a ...
Kafka, Franz
(1883-1924) Czech author, a Jew who wrote in German, active for about a decade before 1914; he was a full tri-cultural inhabitant – a German-speaking Jew in Prague – of the cosmopolitan world that would eventually become Czechoslovakia (see Czech and Slovak SF) after the trauma of World War One, a civilization whose death throes began in 1938. Belying any sense that his outer life slavishly mirrored his ...
Knight, Norman L
(1895-1972) US author and pesticide chemist for the Department of Agriculture until his retirement in 1963. He was not a prolific writer, publishing only 11 stories altogether, the first of which was the serialized novella "Frontier of the Unknown" for Astounding in July and August 1937. He made his main contribution by collaborating with James Blish on A Torrent of Faces (1967). This novel – whose ...
Froese, Edgar
German musician (1944-2015), most famous as part of Tangerine Dream. Froese released a number of solo albums, all instrumental electronica, although most with a distinctive science-fictional feel to them. Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1975) creates aural landscapes, possibly otherworldly, out of mellotron tones, pulsings, whirrings, dronings and other electronic noises. Many subsequent albums (for instance the four-volume Ambient Highway ...
Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man
Film (1951). Universal International Pictures. Directed by Charles Lamont. Screenplay by John Grant, Robert Lees and Frederic I Rinaldo, very loosely based on The Invisible Man (1897) by H G Wells. Cast includes Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Nancy Guild, Arthur Franz. 82 minutes. Black and white. / Boxer Tommy Nelson (Franz) is framed for the murder of a boxing promoter when he refuses to throw a bout as ordered by local gangsters. Knowing that ...
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 ...