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Friday 17 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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Barnes, Arthur K
(1909-1969) US pulp author, known also for his works outside the sf field, who was intermittently active in sf until about 1946, beginning with "Lord of the Lightning" for Wonder Stories in December 1931. His Gerry Carlyle series of Space Opera tales – in which Miss Carlyle and a sidekick hunt down various Aliens, carefully designated as non-sentient, for the London Interplanetary Zoo ...
Carson, Robin
(? - ) Swedish-born author long in the USA whose Pawn of Time: An Extravaganza (1957) is a Time Travel tale somewhat reminiscent of the kind of tale typical of Unknown Magazine in the 1940s: in this case, a modern New Yorker whose name (significantly) is Urban, after his shift in time, comes to dominate early sixteenth-century Venice. [JC]
Besher, Alexander
(1951-2020) China-born, Japanese-raised US author, editor and journalist who published a posthumous edition of David Lindsay's tales as The Violet Apple & The Witch (1976) in his Chicago Review Press, and who began to publish sf in English (some stories had appeared in Japanese) with his Rim cycle, comprising Rim: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1994), Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality (1998) and Chi ...
Captain Nemo and the Underwater City
Film (1969). Omnia/MGM. Directed by James Hill. Written by Pip and Jane Baker, R Wright Campbell, based on the character created by Jules Verne. Cast includes Chuck Connors, Nanette Newman, Luciana Paluzzi and Robert Ryan. 106 minutes. Colour. / Towards the end of the nineteenth century a ship sinks in a violent storm. A few survivors find themselves on board a mysterious underwater vessel, the Nautilus, under the command of the legendary ...
Menick, Jim
(? - ) US editor and author of an sf Satire, Lingo (1991), about the coming to self-awareness of a Computer; once Lingo has gained AI status, megalomania looms. Disguised as an Android, he/it decides to run for the American presidency. There are some laboured moments. [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 ...