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Monday 7 October 2024
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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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Androids
The term "android", which means "manlike", was initially used of Automata, and the form "androides" first appeared in English in 1727 in reference to supposed attempts by the alchemist Albertus Magnus (circa 1200-1280) to create an artificial man; but something like androids long precede their being called androids. Treating Caliban as android-like may over-egg Prospero's Godgame control over his creatures in William ...
Enjoe Toh
(1972- ) Pen-name and preferred romanization of an unidentified Japanese author, a former physicist and postgraduate mathematician whose literary experiments have made him a liminal figure between Japan's sf community and the rarefied discourses of literary awards (see Postmodernism and SF). Such straddling of categories began with his debut works, of which his first published story was the surreal ...
Muse
UK rock band, formed in Devon by frontman Matthew Bellamy (1978- ). The group favours a bombastic and indeed deliberately melodramatic musical style, guitar-based but augmented with many other instruments, amplified and overdriven to sometimes preposterous levels. The group's songs, often science-fictional, are conveyed in Bellamy's distinctive voice, stronger at the top-end and with a wailing falsetto. This is a musical mixture that works well with grandiose or ...
Message from Mars, A
Film (1913). UK Films. Directed by J Wallett Waller. Scenario Waller, based on the play A Message from Mars (1899) by Richard Ganthony. Cast includes Chrissie Bell, E Holman Clark and Charles Hawtrey. 60 minutes, cut to 54 minutes. Black and white. / This moral fable about a messenger sent from Mars to help bring humans – especially the selfish Horace Parlan – to their senses was based on 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. 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 ...