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Thursday 22 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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Adams, Richard
(1920-2016) UK author who became instantly famous with his first novel, Watership Down (1972), a long, grave, well-crafted Animal Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], written ostensibly for children but clearly accessible to adults as well; it was followed by the pendant titles The Watership Down Film Picture Book (1978), which retells the same story as adapted for the animated film ...
Yates, W R
(1950- ) US author of Diasporah (short version in There Will be War, anth 1983, ed John F Carr and Jerry Pournelle; 1985), a tale which moves from the Near Future destruction of Israel (and Islam) in a nuclear Holocaust to the re-establishment of a Zionist state in a ...
Contract
Russian animated film (1985; original title Kontrakt). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Viktor Slavkin, based on Robert Silverberg's "Company Store" (in Star Science Fiction Stories 5, anth 1959, ed Frederik Pohl). Voice cast includes Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy and Evgeniy Steblov. 10 minutes. Colour. / ...
Batey, Joey
(1989- ) UK singer-songwriter, actor and author, active as a musician from university years, and as a film/television actor from 2013. He is of sf interest for It's Not a Cult (2025) (see Music), in which a folk-rock band plays songs whose apparent meaningless lyrics, as transformed into Basilisk-like Memes on the Internet, cause chaos. [JC]
Saxton, Josephine
(1935-2023) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Wall" in Science Fantasy #78 for November 1965, and whose first three novels – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends [sic] (1970) and Group Feast (1971) – established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf Fabulations. ...
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 ...