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Monday 13 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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Gaston, H A
(? -? ) US author of Mars Revealed; Or, Seven days in the Spirit World [for full title see Checklist below] (1880) as by A Spirit Yet in the Flesh, which describes in terms enunciated in the subtitle its protagonist's trip to a Utopian Mars and back again. Not mentioned there are his discovery of high Technology including Airships and ...
Landor, Robert Eyres
(1781-1869) UK minister and author, brother of the more famous Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), whose novel, The Fountain of Arethusa (1848 2vols), combines the supernatural and Proto SF as two explorers enter an Underground world (see Hollow Earth), where they engage in discussions with the worthy dead, who either enjoy an Afterlife [see The ...
Wilson, JJ Amaworo
(1969- ) German-born Nigerian/UK playwright and author, most recently in USA, active since the early 1990s, his early plays and stories being nonfantastic; he has published his academic nonfiction, mostly textbooks on language learning, as JJ Wilson; son of fantasy author David Henry Wilson. He is of initial sf interest for Damnificados (2016), set in a Near Future urban conglomeration ...
Romans, R H
(? -? ) Astronomer and author, probably American, for the 1930s sf Pulp magazines, including "The Moon Conquerors" (Winter 1930 Science Wonder Quarterly), a Space Opera implausibly involving the Moon, though the tale is notable for the suggestion of an electromagnetic drive to launch a Spaceship to the Moon; its companion piece, "The War ...
Sheean, Vincent
(1899-1975) US journalist, traveller and author best known for nonfiction like An American Among the Riffi (1926); he witnessed the Nazi takeover of Prague, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). Of some sf interest is The Tide (1933), which traces the consequences of the Reincarnation of Jesus Christ in a small American city. [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. 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 ...