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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 ...
Hough, Emerson
(1857-1923) US author whose first book, The Singing Mouse Stories (coll 1895), is fantasy, though most of his subsequent works were Westerns of a literary bent, like The Covered Wagon (1922), and including Mother of Gold (1924), in which Psi Powers (in this case scrying) guide the protagonists to an Aztec Lost World, though they find nothing but gold. [JC]
Mackie, Philip
(1918-1985) UK screenwriter whose Television drama, An Englishman's Castle (1978 3 episodes), depicts an England long occupied by Nazi Germany (see Hitler Wins); as its protagonist gradually begins to understand the depths of the tyranny he and his lover suffer under, the tale becomes both darker and more subtle. [JC]
Barbet, Pierre
Pseudonym of Dr Claude Pierre Marie Avice (1925-1995), French author, under his real name a pharmacist and an expert on bionics; he also used the pseudonyms David Maine and Olivier Sprigel. A highly prolific if derivative popular writer of sf from his first publication, of sf interest, Vers un Avenir Perdu ["Towards a Lost Future"] (1962), Barbet published dozens of novels over the next 30 years, ending his career with L'Ere du Spatiopithèque ["The Era of the ...
White, Caroline Earle
(1833-1916) US philanthropist, anti-vivisectionist and author; she was not involved in the women's suffrage movement, but has been considered of Feminist interests for her wide range of activities. She is of some sf interest for Love in the Tropics: A Romance of the South Seas (1890), which is set in an unknown Island in the Pacific (see Lost Worlds), where the shipwrecked protagonist ...
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 ...