SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 7 October 2024
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
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 ...
Sergeant Dead Head
Film (1965). American International. Directed by Norman Taurog. Written by Louis M Heyward. Cast includes Eve Arden, John Ashley, Frankie Avalon, Pat Buttram, Fred Clark, Reginald Gardner, Gale Gordon, Buster Keaton, Harvey Lembeck, Cesar Romero and Deborah Walley. 90 minutes. Colour. / Bumbling Sergeant O K Deadhead (Avalon), his name spelled that way despite the film's title, has been assigned to the base that is about to launch a chimpanzee into space; however, for various ...
Erdman, Alan T
(1946- ) US author whose first novel, Maximum Security: The Mojave Project (2006), polemically examines the California penal system in 2032 (see Crime and Punishment), after a 2016 earthquake has caused the dispersal of facilities, and the Supreme Court's judging capital punishment to be unconstitutional has forced other changes. [JC]
Baker, Scott
(1947- ) US-born author, who spent much of his career in France; for most of that career he has written fantasy and horror, some of it with distinction; his only sf novel is his first book, Symbiote's Crown (1978), a slyly intelligent though uneasily metaphysical Space Opera involving intricate hegiras through Parallel Worlds. Its French edition won the 1982 Prix Apollo for best SF novel ...
Churchill, Winston S
(1874-1965) UK politician and author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953; influential advocate of legalized Eugenics programmes, such as he (with others) expounded in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1912, with "deficiency" being defined in both medical and moral terms. His only novel, Savrola: A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania (May-December 1899 Macmillan's Magazine; 1900), is 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 ...