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Thursday 30 March 2023
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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Brown, Eric
(1960-2023) UK author who began publishing sf – after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) – with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in Autumn 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer ...
Miklowitz, Gloria D
(1927-2015) US author of work for the Young Adult market; the After the Bomb Holocaust sequence, comprising After the Bomb (1985) and After the Bomb: Week One (1987), is set in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack on Los Angeles (see California), and focuses on techniques of immediate survival. Ghastly Ghostly Riddles (coll 1977 chap) is a ...
Avallone, Michael
(1924-1999) US author active since the early 1950s under a number of names in various genres, most active in the 1960s. Although he began publishing genre fiction with "The Man Who Walked on Air" (September 1953 Weird Tales), and though some stories of mild interest appear in Tales of the Frightened (coll 1963; vt Boris Karloff Presents Tales of the Frightened 1973) (see also Lyle Kenyon Engel), ...
McDonnell, Caimh
(1975- ) Irish stand-up comedian and author whose nonfantastic novels [not listed below] have appeared as by Caimh McDonnell. His only work of some sf interest, The Stranger Times (2021) as by C K McDonnell, is a spoofish Satire on a more or less contemporary Britain not dissimilar to the societies portrayed by authors like Tom Holt or Robert Rankin. The protagonist of ...
Banks, Iain M
(1954-2013) Scottish author who published fiction for the general market as Iain Banks, and works aimed more directly at sf readers as Iain M Banks. Although differences in register can be detected between the two forms of his name, as a whole Banks's work is more usefully thought of as ranging through a wide spectrum, rather than as bifurcating into two separate categories. As in the case of Graham Greene's "real novels" and what he called "Entertainments", the distinction between the two ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...