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Saturday 7 September 2024
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.
Site updated on 6 September 2024
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Cooney, Eleanor
(? - ) US author who may be best known for the nonfiction Death in Slow Motion (2003), about the slow decline from Alzheimer's disease of her mother, the novelist Mary Durant (1922-2008). Her fiction comprises a series of historical novels about China, some in collaboration with Daniel Altieri. Of some sf interest is their Shangri-La: The Return to the World of Lost Horizon (1996), a ...
Howey, Hugh
(1975- ) US author who has become very well known for his successful use of a self-publishing model to create a market for his fiction, though his first work – the Bern Saga sequence beginning with Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue (2009) – was released traditionally, fittingly as regards its deliberately traditional Young Adult content. A young female space cadet finds herself travelling the interstellar ...
Crichton, Neil
(1932- ) Canadian photographer and author in whose sf novel, Rerun (1976), a man from 1990 Timeslips fifteen years back into his own life of the mid-1970s, where he gains material wealth but loses his soul. [JC]
Nanotechnology
Item of terminology borrowed by sf writers from theoreticians of future Technology, and increasingly popular in sf from the late 1980s. It seems to have been first used by K Eric Drexler in 1976, and popularized by him in his highly optimistic book on the subject, Engines of Creation (1986). / Nanotechnology – the term loosely combines "nano", the SI (metric system) prefix denoting 10-9, with "technology" – means the technology of the ...
Werewolves
Werewolves have featured in the literatures of the Western World from at least the time of Homer, but have not in any significant way contributed to the story of Proto SF, and in their ancient, mythological sense are not dealt with in this encyclopedia (but see further reading below). This class of Supernatural Creature – along with Vampires and other ...
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 ...