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Tuesday 14 January 2025
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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Shadow, The
This crime-fighting character made his debut in 1930 as narrator of the US Radio programme Detective Story. The opening lines soon became famous: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" In 1937 the very popular programme became The Shadow and continued through well over 600 episodes until 1954, with Orson Welles in the star role 1937-1938; among its many scriptwriters were Alfred ...
Munsey's Magazine
US magazine published by Frank A Munsey and edited initially by John Kendrick Bangs for only six months and then by Richard H Titherington. It began on 2 February 1889 as Munsey's Weekly, but became a monthly as Munsey's Magazine from October 1891-October 1929, when it merged with Argosy All-Story Weekly (see The Argosy) to form two magazines, ...
Rose Red
Short film (1994). BFI Production, Channel 4, Konnick Films. Directed by Simon Pummell. Written by Simon Ings and Simon Pummell. Cast includes Jennifer Calvert, Carolyn Choa, Simon Henshall and Sian Thomas. Colour. 19 minutes. / Detective Thomas Shaw (Henshall) has a recurring dream in which he pulls a woman from the sea, but then commits a violent act against her. In his waking life, he is called into a laboratory to investigate the theft of vials of ...
Tsutsui Yasutaka
(1934- ) Multiple-award winning author, sometime actor and scenarist, whose works of Absurdist SF and commentary on the Media Landscape made him one of the Big Three of Japanese sf in the twentieth century, alongside Shinichi Hoshi and Sakyō Komatsu. He is best understood first as Japan's answer to the ...
Powlik, James
(? - ) Canadian oceanographer and author, whose first novel, Sea Change (1999), sees the oceans threatened by mutated micro-organisms (see Horror in SF; Mutants); second tale dealing with the threatened oceans of the world, Meltdown (2000), is a Technothriller in which a source of deadly radiation under the Arctic may bring about ...
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 ...