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Saturday 22 January 2022
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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Turner, Gerry
(1921-1982) US portrait photographer and author of fiction for the Young Adult market, including one sf novel, Stranger from the Depths (1967). Here the seeming last survivor of an ancient amphibian civilization from the Hollow Earth is discovered by a party of young US high-schoolers and their mentor, a college professor. The lizard-like being awakens (see Sleeper Awakes) and leads them to his people's Underground City; but there are other survivors in another city, and conflict ensues. ...
Levinrew, Will
Pseudonym of US author William Levine (1881-? ), who seems to have been active in the late 1920s and 1930s, publishing several crime novels during this period, usually featuring the deductive exploits of the elderly Professor Herman Brierly. Seemingly unnatural events and murders are usually brought back to the mundane by the professor, though The Poison Plague (5 August 1922 Argosy All-Story Weekly; 1929) edges into sf as the eponymous disease transforms New York. Murder from ...
Kandel, Michael
(1941- ) US book editor, translator and author, best known until the late 1980s for his brilliant translations from the Polish of works by Stanisław Lem, among them a pyrotechnic rendering of the novella "Kongres Futurologiczny" (1971 Poland) as The Futurological Congress (1974), many of whose wordplays as translated here being of necessity Kandel's own coinings. The Cosmic Carnival of Stanisław Lem (coll 1981), which Kandel assembled, contains excerpts from ...
Wilson, Gahan
(1930-2019) American artist and author, best known for his work outside the genre as a cartoonist, his career beginning in the mid-1940s; associated mainly for many decades with such Slick magazines as Playboy (from 1957) and The New Yorker (from 1980). The bizarre and often macabre sense of Humour he displayed in his innumerable cartoons, though influenced by such precursors as Charles Addams, has had a broad impact on the style and substance of American culture as a whole. He drew in ...
Holmes, Jeffrey
(1934-2007) UK-born author and journalist, long resident in Canada, whose Near Future sf novel, Farewell to Nova Scotia (1974), makes ironical and Satirical use of a natural Disaster which cuts Nova Scotia off from the mainland. [JC]
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 November 1966, where much of his earlier criticism also appeared. This criticism, despite some studiously ...