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Tuesday 18 January 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.
Site updated on 17 January 2022
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Coneheads
Film (1993). Paramount. Directed by Steve Barron, produced Lorne Michaels. Written by Tom Davis & Aykroyd and Bonnie Turner & Terry Turner. Cast includes Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Michael McKean and Laraine Newman. 82 minutes. Colour. / This gentle and very lightweight Satire, an intermittently amusing comedy, is based on sketches first performed on the US television show Saturday Night Live. Two Aliens (Aykroyd and Curtin), humanoids with conical heads who are married to one ...
Ash, Brian
(1936-2010) UK scientific journalist, editor and author. His Faces of the Future: The Lessons of Science Fiction (1975) assumes that its readers might be ignorant of sf, which leads to more plot summarizing than some sf readers found useful. His Who's Who in Science Fiction (1976; rev 1977) was well received by the general press, but heavily attacked in the sf specialist press for omissions and errors; the revised edition corrected many of the inaccuracies. Ash then edited the thematically ...
Dvorkin, Daniel
(1969- ) US author, son of David Dvorkin, with whom he wrote a Star Trek Tie: Star Trek: The Next Generation #8: The Captain's Honor (1989) with David Dvorkin, and Dawn Crescent (2003) with David Dvorkin (whom see for details). [JC]
Burroughs, William S
(1914-1997) US author born into a successful business family, and a Harvard graduate in English literature in 1936, but a deeply transgressive and famous drop-out thereafter. He lived in Mexico, North Africa and the UK, and for many years was a heroin addict. He began writing in the late 1930s, but had no success until the early 1950s when he wrote two confessional books: Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953 as by William Lee; rev as by Burroughs 1977) and Queer: A Novel ...
Morgan, Richard
(1965- ) British author who began publishing work of genre interest with Altered Carbon (2002) as by Richard K Morgan; the middle initial also appears on US reprints. Altered Carbon was the first of a three-volume sequence featuring the mercenary/detective Takeshi Kovacs, subsequent books being Broken Angels (2003) and Woken Furies (2005). The setting of the Kovacs sequence is a United Nations-supervised group of planets whose economy is dominated by the availability of a ...
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 ...