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Friday 30 October 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the 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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Kress, Nancy
(1948- ) US author, married to Charles Sheffield from 1998 until his death in 2002 and married to Jack Skillingstead from 2011; she also writes as by Anna Kendall. She began publishing sf with "The Earth Dwellers" in Galaxy for December 1976, though her first novels were fantasies like The Prince of Morning Bells (1981), a quest tale during which, ...
Greenwood, Ed
(1959- ) Canadian Game-World designer and author, whose development of the Forgotten Realms "campaign setting" for the Role Playing Game Dungeons & Dragons was singularly successful, one result being a large number of associated novels and similar fantasies [not listed below]. Greenwood is of some sf interest for ...
Marr, John S
(1940- ) US doctor, epidemiologist and author whose official positions have included Director of the New York City Bureau of Communicable Diseases and State Epidemiologist of Virginia (retired 2006). His medical expertise fuelled the Disaster thriller The Black Death (1977) with Gwyneth Cravens, centred on an outbreak of pneumonic plague in New York, and the race ...
Phillips, Helen
(1981- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Joined" in The Mississippi Review for Spring 2008. Much of her short fiction, fabulistic and conversant with (though not perhaps deeply penetrating) the toolkit of Fantastika, has been assembled in And Yet They Were Happy (coll 2011) and Some Possible Solutions (coll 2016). Her first novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat ...
Lost Horizon
1. Film (1937). Columbia. Directed by Frank Capra. Written by Robert Riskin, based on Lost Horizon (1933) by James Hilton. Cast includes Ronald Colman, Edward Everett Horton, Sam Jaffe, Thomas Mitchell, H B Warner and Jane Wyatt. 133 minutes, cut to 118 minutes, then to 109 minutes; but 128 minute print (some lost footage being represented by stills) available from 2000. Black and white. / In this memorably sentimental, deft, ...
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 ...