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Monday 24 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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Benét, Stephen Vincent
(1898-1943) US author, active from before 1915, very briefly involved in World War One until his myopia was discovered; brother of William Rose Benét. He was initially most noted for his moderately copious Poetry, including an Arabian fantasy, The Drug-Shop; Or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (1917 chap). The earliest examples of poems with direct sf interest are probably "Winged Man" (in Young Adventure: A Book of Poems, coll 1918), which visualizes Icarus's flight reaching "the highest steeps ...
Ogawa Issui
(1975- ) Pseudonymous Japanese author – real name unknown – whose early work was published as by Tomonori Kawade, commencing with "Little Star" (1994 Jump Novel), an account of life in the solar system in the twenty-second century. He dropped out of university in the year he first published under his new pen name, with Earth Guard (1997). / Much of his early work is in the ephemeral pulps known in Japanese as Light Novels: more accurately book-form ...
Kurtén, Björn
(1924-1988) Finnish palaeontologist and author whose fiction appeared first in his native Swedish, his first novel of potential sf interest being published as early as 1941. His sf novels – Den svarta tigern (1978 Sweden; trans Kurtén as Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age 1980) with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), and Mammutens raddare (1984 Sweden; trans Kurtén as Singletusk: A Novel of the Ice Age 1986) – fascinatingly apply ...
Dreamcatcher
Film (2003). Castle Rock Entertainment presents a Kasdan Pictures production in association with Village Roadshow Pictures and NPV Entertainment. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Written by William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, based on the novel Dreamcatcher (2001) by Stephen King. Cast includes Giacomo Baessato, Rosemary Dunsmore, Morgan Freeman, Mikey Holekamp, Thomas Jane, Eric Keenleyside, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Joel Palmer, Andrew Robb, Tom Sizemore, Reece Thompson and ...
Wormholes
Item of sf Terminology borrowed from speculative Physics; the term was coined in 1957 by the physicist John A Wheeler (1911-2008) to describe a hypothetical short-cut through space/time corresponding very roughly to the beloved sf concept of Hyperspace. Wormholes may be associated with Black Holes (another Wheeler coinage) and their once-fashionable but probably nonexistent counterparts White Holes. Such "Schwarzschild wormholes" would not be usable for transport – a point which failed to ...
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 ...