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Thursday 17 July 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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 16 July 2025
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Williams, Tess
(1954-2025) UK-born teacher, editor and author, in Australia for many years, there receiving a degree in literature from Curtin University and an MA in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Padwan Affair" in She's Fantastical (anth 1995) edited by Judith Raphael Buckrich and Lucy Sussex. Of sf interest are two novels: Map of Power (1996), set mostly in a ...
Woods, Lance
(1961- ) US author whose Heroic Park (2012) is set mainly in a Near Future Theme Park where ordinary humans can escape constant comparisons with the Superheroes who infest the world outside. But trouble looms, both in the caverns Underground where the park is run, and in the manufactured New York ...
Ruggero, Ed
(1956- ) US soldier and author, usually of nonfantastic military fiction, though his first novel, 38 North Yankee (1990), is a very Near Future tale in which North Korea once again invades South Korea. [JC]
Cactus Makes Perfect
Short US film (1942). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Del Lord. Written by Elwood Ullman and Monte Collins (story and screenplay). Cast includes Ernie Adams (uncredited), Collins (uncredited), Vernon Dent (uncredited), Larry Fine, Curly Howard, Moe Howard and Eddie Laughton (uncredited). 17 minutes. Black and white. / The mother (Collins) of the Three Stooges (at the time Fine, Curly Howard, and Moe Howard) throws her slothful sons out of her house to seek their fortunes. Employing ...
Corpsicle
One of the wittier items of sf Terminology, coined by Frederik Pohl as "corpse-sicle" in his contribution to the Cryonics symposium – also including Robert C W Ettinger – "Immortality Through Freezing" (August 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow), and contracted to "corpsicle" in Pohl's novel ...
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 ...