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Tuesday 14 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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Kimmel, Daniel M
(1955- ) US journalist, film critic and author, active as a columnist for The Boston Herald (1996-1998) and elsewhere 1984-current, most of his nonfiction being concerned with Cinema and the Media Landscape in general. Of his several volumes of nonfiction, Jar Jar Binks Must Die ... and Other Observations About Science Fiction Movies (coll 2011) is of considerable interest for its ...
Phelps, Gilbert
(1915-1993) UK broadcaster and author who spent much of his career in the BBC, as a radio producer and in other roles between 1945 and 1960. His first story, "I Have Lived a Hundred Years" in The Faber Book of West Country Stories (anth 1951), prefigured the thematic material of his first sf novel, The Centenarians (1958), whose protagonists attempt – in the end unsuccessfully – to translate their eminence in the arts and sciences into lives safely ...
Wootton, Barbara
(1897-1988) UK economist, academic and author, whose husband died on the Western Front (see World War One) a month after their marriage, deeply affecting her future work; she was created a life peer in 1958. Her Scientific Romance, London's Burning: A Novel for the Decline and Fall of the Liberal Age (1936), which is set in 1940 London, describes in anti-fascist terms a ...
Fawkes, Frank Attfield
(1849-1941) UK industrialist and author, mostly of nonfiction, whose one sf novel, Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe: Being a Record of Some Strange Adventures in the Remarkable Career of a Political and Social Reformer Who Was Famous at the Commencement of the Twentieth Century (1895) as by X, is a Future War tale dominated by intrigues surrounding the complex triumph of a British reformer known as Marmaduke who proposes a European state, and after his ...
Paternoster, G Sidney
(1866-1925) UK author whose Motor Pirate sequence, comprising The Motor Pirate (fixup 1903) and The Cruise of the Conquistador: Being the Further Adventures of the Motor Pirate (fixup 1905), features the exploits of the eponymous masked highwayman (and later pirate), making use of a car of an advanced Technology, and later – in episodes internally identified as being set in the Near Future ...
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 ...