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Tuesday 15 October 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.
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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Ruins and Futurity
Ruins are not a necessary prelude to Futurity. A ruined structure may be nothing more than a structure that has fallen into illegible ruin (see Entropy), leaving no message for us to draw upon: no warning to the world we live in, no sense that it fronts in stone a meaningful Time Abyss, or some anticipation of things to come. But from time immemorial a Ruin, or in more recent times an Edifice constructed in the shape of a Ruin [for ...
Kobayashi Yasumi
(1962-2020) Japanese sf, mystery and horror author, who graduated in engineering from Osaka University, and worked in Communications technology at the Sanyō Electronics Institute of New Materials. His debut as an author, "Kangu Shūrisha" ["Toy Repairer"] (April 1995 Yasei Jidai; title story of coll 1999), concerns Faustian pacts with a sinister woman who will fix any toy, and later any child, for a price. With ...
Spacesuit Films
Spacesuit films, as defined by the critic who has promoted the term, Gary Westfahl, are those space films that endeavour to plausibly portray the harsh conditions and novel features of life in outer space and on other planets – such as the absence of air, zero or low Gravity, and dangerous radiation – as most prominently indicated by the fact that their characters constantly wear, or are in close proximity to, protective ...
Dick, Kay
Working name of UK editor and author Kathleen Elsie Dick (1915-2001). She edited The Windmill (1946-1948), a literary magazine, as by Edward Lane; and published three anthologies as by Jeremy Scott, the second of them, At Close of Eve: An Anthology of New Curious Stories (anth 1947), being an Original Anthology of some interest. A late work, They: A Sequence of Unease (fixup 1977 chap), resembles thematically and in its ...
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 ...