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Sunday 24 September 2023
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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Neville, Jill
(1932-1997) Australian journalist, playwright and author, mostly in the UK from 1951; she was the sister of Richard Neville (1941-2016), editor of Oz in the 1960s and author of Footprints of the Future: Handbook for the Third Millennium (2002). Neville was not much drawn to sf, though her second novel, The Love-Germ (1969), is an occasionally sharp sf Satire set in the Near Future, which traces the ...
Stanford, J K
(1892-1971) UK civil servant, solider and author, mostly of humorous material, whose first book, The Twelfth (1944 chap; vt The Twelfth and After: Being the Life and Death of George Hysteron-Proteron 1964), is a spoofish fantasy whose hunter protagonist is turned into a bird, and organizes his new kin to avoid being shot. His sf Satire, Full Moon at Sweatenham: A Nightmare (1953), takes rather clumsy potshots at a decadent, ...
Prantera, Amanda
(1942- ) UK-born translator and author, in Italy since the age of twenty-two, several of whose works combine a strong, fluent emotional drive with a use of narrative conventions, like the Gothic, that comes close to Parody. This is very clear in her first novel, Strange Loop (1984), in which an overheated young Catholic woman is convinced she is a Werewolf, and the narrator of the tale ties himself ...
Scott-Moncrieff, D
(1907-1987) UK vintage car restorer and author, who hyphenated his surname for his books, which included some nonfiction. In Not for the Squeamish (coll 1948), the first of his two volumes of stories, of direct sf interest is "Count Szolnok's Robots", in which Robots are terminally evil, with several other tales edge into the realms of Gothic SF; his second collection, The Vaivaisukko's Bride (coll 1949 ...
Spiritualised
UK band, formed by and in effect wholly comprising Jason Pierce (1965- ), who sometimes records under the alias "J. Spaceman". There is a floaty, dreamy quality to much Spiritualised music that is focused sometimes through Religion ("Walking With Jesus", "Angel Sigh", both tracks on 1993's album Fucked Up Inside) and sometimes via sf, or more specifically space travel. The band's third studio album ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...