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Friday 27 May 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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Porter, Andrew
(1946- ) US editor and publisher, active in Fandom since the 1960s, who founded and ran the influential Algol, for which he won a 1974 Hugo, as well as its longer-lived companion, Science Fiction Chronicle, a major Newszine which won Hugos as best Semiprozine in 1993 and 1994. Science Fiction Chronicle was eventually acquired by DNA publications in 2000, with Porter continuing as news editor until replaced in 2002. / Porter also published several titles under his ...
Ragged, Hyder
Pseudonym of UK lawyer and author Henry Chartres Biron (1863-1940) for King Solomon's Wives; Or, the Phantom Mines (1887), a Parody of H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), of sf interest specifically for the spoof description of how the protagonists travel in a Balloon equipped with a device which keeps it stationary while the world turns. This pseudonym has sometimes erroneously been ascribed to John de Morgan, himself the author of several Haggard parodies. [JC]
Langley, Kenlis
Working name of Indian-born soldier and author Kenlis Langley Stevenson (1875-1946), in UK from an early age, in Canada from some point after World War One; his juvenile novel (see Children's SF), The Mountain of Mystery: A Tale of the Arabian Desert (1929), is set in a Lost World discovered by boy adventurers in North Africa. [JC]
Davis, Jake
Pseudonym of the unidentified author (? - ) – presumably US – of The Last Rangers sequence of sf Westerns, beginning with The Last Rangers (1992), and set in a post-Disaster environment soothingly reminiscent of the imagined nineteenth-century West, in which the Cybernetically enhanced Alamo Smith faces down grotesque foes. The series is copyright by its publisher, and may have had three authors, if they rode alone; or more. [JC]
Jackson, Charles Loring
(1847-1935) US chemist, influential academic and author, whose The Gold Point and Other Strange Stories (coll 1926) contains several sf tales, including "The Cube", about an amoeba-like Monster capable of imitating human form and Identity Transfer, and "An Undiscovered Island in the Far Sea", in which two strange interrelated intelligent species are discovered on a Pacific Island. [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. 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 ...