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Tuesday 8 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 ...
Lawson, Alfred William
(1869-1954) US baseball player (a pitcher very briefly in the National Baseball League in 1890), opponent of the Ku Klux Klan (he attempted to break the colour bar in professional baseball), aviator and businessman (founder of Lawson Aircraft Company in 1919), inventor (mainly of the Pseudoscience Lawsonomy, a unified field principle that explains physics in terms of "zig-zag and swirl" and other principles: "Suction is the female of movement and Pressure is ...
Weisinger, Mort
(1915-1978) US editor, actively involved in sf Fandom from the early 1930s, editing Fantasy Magazine, the leading Fanzine of its day; he also sold a few sf stories, starting with The Price of Peace (1933 chap), this, according to Science Fiction Bibliography (1935 chap) by William Crawford and D R Welch, being a chapbook edition from ...
Stepford Wives, The
Film (1974). Fadsin Cinema Associates/Columbia. Directed by Bryan Forbes. Written by William Goldman, based on The Stepford Wives (1972) by Ira Levin. Cast includes Peter Masterson, Nanette Newman, Patrick O'Neal, Paula Prentiss and Katharine Ross. 115 minutes. Colour. / In this black but rather crude Satire on the role of women in US society, the men of Stepford, a sleepy, attractive Connecticut town, take part ...
Vetch, Thomas
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Amber City: Being Some Account of the Adventures of a Steam Crocodile in Central Africa (1888), a Jules-Verne-like excursion narrated by the protagonist, Thomas Vetch, who takes his flying ship into a mild-mannered African Lost World where people live in houses built of amber. [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 ...