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Tuesday 14 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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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Augustinus
Pseudonym of unknown UK author (? -? ) whose two sf novels – Two Brothers: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1898) and Paul Rees: A Story of the Coming Reformation (1899) – are designed as religious propaganda; in both cases, saintly Catholics successfully oppose spiritualism and the spirit of untoward rebelliousness. In the second, set in 1905, a heathen UK is defeated by an Invention at the ...
Sociology
Sociology is the systematic study of society and social relationships. The word was coined by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was then that the first attempts were made to divorce studies of society employing the scientific method, on the one hand, from dogmatic political and ethical presuppositions, on the other. Social studies in a more general sense have, of course, a much longer history, going back to Plato. Sociology and sf have a ...
Hossain, Saad Z
(1979- ) Bangladeshi author whose first novel, Baghdad Immortals (2013; vt Escape from Baghdad! 2015), treats the world of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein as a surreal nightmare (see Imperialism; Satire; War); the tale traces the appalled and appalling "antics" of its two protagonists as they attempt to smuggle a torturer out of the land he has helped ...
Serling, Carol
(1929-2020) US editor and Television producer, married to Rod Serling from 1948 until his death in 1975 and long associated with his enterprises, in particular The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). She edited Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader (anth 1987) with Martin H Greenberg and Charles G Waugh (see ...
Moody, H A
(? -? ) US author of an unusually intense Lost Race tale, The City Without a Name (1898), in which a white explorer, disguising himself as an Indian, discovers an Incan City whose king is in fact a woman in disguise. The land is surrounded by Monsters. They fall in love, marry, have a son, she is killed, her husband escapes. Twenty years later the son must ...
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 ...