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Friday 27 May 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.
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Bishop, William Henry
(?1843-? ) US author – apparently not William Henry Bishop (1847-1928) – whose Utopia, The Garden of Eden, U.S.A.: A Very Possible Story (1895), posits an equable world, with equality between the sexes. [JC]
Bickerton, Derek
(1926-2018) US linguist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii; of marginal sf interest, but a cognitively intriguing examination of the problems of Communication between species, King of the Sea (1979), tells of the experiences of a man who lives with dolphins. [JC]
Poland
Most Western sf readers associate Poland principally with the work of Stanisław Lem, whose books, widely published, much appreciated, and thoroughly scrutinized in the West, had a profound impact on the field. Lem still remains an iconic figure both in and out of Poland, while his enormous worldwide popularity more or less directly inspired the interest in the earlier Fantastika (John Clute's umbrella term seems particularly useful in this context, in part because of its Central- and ...
Freejack
Film (1992). Morgan Creek/Ronald Shusett/Warner Bros. Directed by Geoff Murphy. Written by Steven Pressfield, Ronald Shusett, Dan Gilroy, based on Immortality Delivered (October 1958-February 1959 Galaxy as "Time Killer"; 1958; exp vt Immortality, Inc. 1959) by Robert Sheckley. Cast includes Jonathan Banks, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Hopkins, Mick Jagger and Rene Russo. 108 minutes. Colour. / From the producers of Total Recall (1990) and the New Zealand director of The Quiet Earth (1985), this ...
BlöödHag
US death metal band based in Seattle, Washington, which unusually focused on sf, fantasy and horror authors in short songs homaging and providing some sketchy bio-bibliographical information on their subjects. The original 1996 band members were Jeff McNulty (guitar), Jake Stratton (vocals), Zachary Orgel (bass) and a drum machine subsequently replaced by Rod Karp (drums) and later by Brent Carpenter (drums). Their demo tape Swords and Deviltry (1996) – taking its title from a Fritz ...
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 ...