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Monday 10 August 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Austria
Austrian literature must be considered a part of the larger German literature (see Germany), although with a distinct voice; Austrian writers have always been published more by German publishing houses than by Austrian ones. / At the turn of the century, Vienna was a veritable laboratory for many of the ideas of modern times, from psychoanalysis and logical positivism to music, the arts and literature: here were found Sigmund ...
Coppel, Alfred
Working name of US author (and wartime fighter pilot) Alfredo José de Araña-Marini y Coppel Jr (1921-2004) who also wrote as Robert Cham Gilman and Sol Galaxan (for one story only, 1953). He began publishing sf with "Age of Unreason" in Astounding for December 1947, and published a good deal of magazine fiction in the next decade, though he was in fact producing considerably more in other genres with such action novels as Hero Driver (1954). ...
Quincy, J P
(1829-1910) US lawyer, politician (mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, 1895-1899) and author. After, Lyteria: A Dramatic Poem (1854), a long philosophical verse drama set in Roman times with strong hints of the supernatural, he mostly published legal studies, though his one novel, The Peckster Professorship: An Episode in the History of Psychical Research (1888), is of sf interest as an attempt to put various occult preoccupations – divination, prophecy (see ...
Rathjen, Carl H
(1909-1984) US author in various genres from boys' fiction to tales for the "slick" markets; he also wrote as Charlotte Russell. Of sf interest is his contribution to the Land of the Giants sequence, Land of the Giants: Flight of Fear (1969), about the adventures of the occupants of a Spaceship who plunge through a Wormhole to a planet occupied by giant humanoids (see ...
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Also known as OMD. UK synth-pop band, formed in 1978 by Andy McCluskey (1959- ) and Paul Humphreys (1960- ). OMD rode the slipstream of Kraftwerk inflected synth-pop, much as did Gary Numan and the Human League, although the OMD sound is generally speaking brighter, poppier and more upbeat than that of their fellows. This cheerier tone expresses itself ...
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 ...