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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 ...
Science Fiction Digest
1. US Digest-size magazine. Two issues, February and May 1954, published by Specific Fiction Corporation, New York, edited by Chester Whitehorn. Science Fiction Digest was intended as a reprint magazine which would take its material from the slick general-fiction magazines and other sources, but the selections were weak and it quickly failed. Its (purportedly) nonfiction articles had a strong occult and ESP bent. The same ...
Wittig, Monique
(1935-2003) French author, in US from 1976, whose first novel with sf interest, Les Guérillères (1969; trans David Le Vay as Les Guérillères 1971), transforms the arguments of Feminism into a series of narrative litanies that work movingly to describe an abstract "tribe" of lesbian Amazons in a constant state of warfare with their natural enemy; the novel balances Equipoisally ...
Krasznahorkai, László
(1954- ) Hungarian author whose first novel to come to international attention, Sátántangó ["Satan's Tango"] (1985; trans George Szirtes as Satantango 2012), is placed in an isolated, apocalyptically claustrophobic collective farm; the narrative, disjunctively evocative of the works of Franz Kafka, conveys a sense of profound cenotaphic abandonment: for the ...
Carruth, Hayden
(1862-1932) US author and literary editor of The Women's Home Companion; The Adventures of Jones (coll of linked stories 1895), in which Jones tell his audience various tall tales, some of them sf, some of them about his own Inventions; during the course of these narratives, much contemporary sf – including the fading vogue for the extraordinary voyage (see Fantastic Voyages) is spoofed. [JC]
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...