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Monday 13 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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Battle of the Planets
Animated tv series (1978-1980). Sandy Frank Entertainment. Syndicated. Produced by Alan Dinehart, David E Hanson. Directors included Dinehart and Hanson. Writers included Peter Germano, Howard Post and Harry Winkler among many others. Animation designers included Alex Toth. Cast includes Casey Casem, Alan Oppenheimer, Ronnie Schell, Janet Waldo and Alan Young. 85 30-minute episodes. Colour. / Some time in the future, ...
Poetry
The past century or so, as the SF Megatext began to form, was a period not markedly friendly to narrative verse in general, and good sf narratives in verse during this period are unsurprisingly not often found. Examples of lyric sf poetry – short poems in which sf tropes and topoi expectably uncover the state of mind of the poet – are much more common, though few of these rank very high in the literatures of the West. When identifiable sf "moves" can ...
Kircher, Athanasius
(1602-1680) German Jesuit priest and polymath, author of at least thirty ambitious texts unified by a profound desire to detect and determine and correlate original causes in all phenomena; his influence on later generations has been severely dissipated by his initial, conservative Christian adherence to a geocentric model of the universe (a century after Copernicus), though he changed his mind, and by the fact that – far more than other "sleepwalkers" into ...
Carcosa
1. Carcosa House was a fan-run US specialist publishing house formed to produce the first book edition of Edison's Conquest of Mars (1947) by Garrett P Serviss. No further books appeared. / 2. The name Carcosa (not Carcosa House) was used for a different Small Press founded in 1973 under the direction of David Drake and Karl Edward ...
Balle, Solvej
(1962- ) Danish publisher, editor, translator and author; her first novel Lyrefugl ["Lyrebird"] (1986), a Robinsonade whose protagonist is lost on an Island, verges on the fantastic. She is primarily of sf interest for the multi-volume Om udregning af rumfang (2020-continuing), an ongoing novel whose first two instalments – ...
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 ...