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Sunday 16 February 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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Moore, Chris
(1947-2025) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produced covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well, including illustrations of record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impressed most about Moore's sf art was not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, achieved largely through a ...
Hornig, Charles D
(1916-1999) US editor whose career began in September 1933 when, as a young sf fan, he started a Fanzine called The Fantasy Fan: The Fans' Own Magazine (see Amateur Magazine), and happened to send a copy of it to Hugo Gernsback. By coincidence, Gernsback was at that time looking for a new managing editor for Wonder Stories, and was so impressed by ...
Masters, Dexter
(1908-1989) US editor and author, mostly resident in the UK in later life (due to McCarthyite persecution in the 1950s), whose only sf novel was The Cloud Chamber (1971), in which World War Three drives the nations of the world Underground. As an editor, he is significant for One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb (anth 1946 chap) with Katherine May, in ...
Linguistics
Linguistics is the study of language, how languages work, what their function is, how they are constructed and whence they are derived. As a discipline it has leapt to academic prominence since the 1960s. Languages play a surprisingly important role in sf, and many stories turn on linguistic issues. The theme overlaps, naturally, with that of Communications, and also to some extent with those of Anthropology and ...
Martyn, Wyndham
Pseudonym of UK author William Henry Martin Hosken (1874-1963), in the US from 20 July 1904, having travelled as Wyndham Martyn, just before he began publishing fiction in American magazines, sometimes also as W H G Wyndham Martin, Croydon Heath, or William Grenvil. He seems to have written (and may have lived as) Wyndham Martyn from an early date; and although the record of his death gives Grenvil W Martyn, there is no evidence he ever legally changed his birth name. He was the first cousin of ...
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 ...