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Tuesday 24 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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Thompson, Vance
(1863-1925) US literary critic and author in various genres (including early twentieth-century nutritionism). The Carnival of Destiny (coll of linked stories 1916) depicts a sequence of Reincarnations in terms of fantasy; The Scarlet Iris (1924; vt The Tarnished Woman 1924) is supernatural horror; and The Green Ray (November 1922-March 1923 Munsey's as "The Man of the Miracle"; 1924) is hoax rather than sf, except for some ambivalence surrounding a Black man bleached white and unpleasantly made ...
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
Japanese animated tv series (2002-2005). Based on the Manga by Masamune Shirow. Production I.G. Written and directed by Kenji Kamiyama. Voice cast includes Akio Ohtsuka, Osamu Saka, Sakiko Tamagawa, Atsuko Tanaka and Kōichi Yamadera. 52 25-minute episodes. Colour. / This Anime continues the story of Section 9, the Japanese Government's counter-terrorism and cyber- intelligence taskforce, after the events of the film Ghost in the Shell (1995); the first season is set in 2030, the second ...
Allen, Henry Wilson
(1912-1991) US author, as Will Henry, of many Westerns, including MacKenna's Gold (1963), later filmed. His sf novel, Genesis Five (1968), narrated by a resident Mongol, depicts the Soviet creation of a dubious Superman in Siberia in a world in which the Cold War has become perpetual. [JC]
Bellow, Saul
(1915-2005) Canadian-born US author, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature, and generally thought of as the premier Mainstream novelist of his generation in the US. Some of his books distantly resemble sf, specifically Henderson the Rain King (1959), a picaresque partly set in a quasimythical African kingdom. Mr Sammler's Planet (1970) has been wrongly annexed as sf by several commentators, who perhaps relied on the title alone; in the novel mankind's reaching of the Moon, and the ...
Chester, Deborah A
(1957- ) US author whose earlier work was written as by Jay D Blakeney or as by Sean Dalton, but who has published under her own name since 1996. Her Anthi sequence – The Children of Anthi (1985) and Requiem for Anthi (1990), written as by Jay D Blakeney – aroused some interest. It is a far-reaching and moderately complex vision of humanity's future Evolution, guided by the eponymous AI, into a form that is half-flesh and half-electronics. Set on a heavily ...
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 ...