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Saturday 8 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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Sarrantonio, Al
(1952-2025) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ahead of the Joneses" in Asimov's for March 1979. Much of his work was horror, sometimes tinged with sf (see Horror in SF), including his first novel, The Worms (1985), a Gothic tale set in Massachusetts with hints of H P Lovecraft; and the Equipoisal Moonbane ...
Chapman, Edgar L
(1936-2019) US academic and sf critic, with the English Department at Bradley University (Peoria, Illinois) 1963-2002, then professor emeritus at Bradley until his death. His solo works include studies of Philip José Farmer and Robert Silverberg: The Magic Labyrinth of Philip José Farmer (1984 chap) and The Road to Castle Mount: The Science Fiction of Robert Silverberg (1999). ...
Superworld Comics
US Comics series. Publisher: Hugo Gernsback as Kosmos Publishing. Three bimonthly issues, April to August 1940. / Arguably the first all-sf comic, this was Gernsback's short-lived venture into the comics field, launched soon after the Fiction House title Planet Comics made its debut in January 1940. Regular features with cover billing on all three issues were "Buzz Allen, Invisible Avenger", ...
Pendleton, John
(1848-?1926) UK journalist, railway historian and author of a Lost Race novel, The Ivory Queen: A Story of Strange Adventure (1897), set in Africa, where survivors of the fall of the Palmyrene Empire of Queen Zenobia (240-circa 274) have fled, and whose descendants have established an agrarian Utopia. [JC]
Keeler, Harry Stephen
(1890-1967) US electrical engineer, editor and author of more than 70 crime-and-detection thrillers whose bizarre complexity – the "webwork novel", in his own phrase – irrelevant stories-within-stories and reliance on a multiplicity of staggering coincidences led to his being cherished by fans for other than literary reasons, rather as R Lionel Fanthorpe is enjoyed for his unashamed padding. Keeler's situations often verge on the science-fictional, ...
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 ...