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Wednesday 16 September 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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King, Graham
(1930-1999) UK author of a Near Future sf thriller, Killtest (1978), in which British security forces must combat a secret ring of gladiatorial conflicts (see Games and Sports) to the death. King should not be confused with the UK film director Graham King (1961- ). [JC]
Haskin, Byron
(1899-1984) US cinematographer, special effects creator and director, in the American army during World War One. His film career began in 1919 when he became an assistant cameraman for Louis J Selznick. He directed four films in 1927, but later worked mostly as a cinematographer; he supervised the special-effects department for Warner Bros 1936-1947. In 1947 he began directing again with I Walk Alone, a Hal Wallis production. In 1952 he formed a ...
Graves, C L
(1856-1944) Irish-born editor and author, largely resident in England, Robert Graves's uncle; his anonymous sf spoof, The War of the Wenuses: Translated from the Artesian of H G Pozzuoli (1898) with E V Lucas, Parodies H G Wells's The War of the Worlds (April-December 1897 Pearson's; 1898) not wisely but too ...
Hornaday, William T
(1854-1937) US naturalist and taxidermist – chief taxidermist with the Smithsonian Institution from 1882, and first director of the Bronx Zoo, beginning in 1896 – and author, in whose Lost Race tale, The Man Who Became a Savage; A Story of Our Times (1896), a jaded American flees to Borneo, where he discovers an unknown civilization of headhunters. [JC]
Lanza, Clara
(1859-1939) US author, a marquise by marriage into the Italian nobility in 1878, whose Mr Perkins' Daughter (1881) flirts with Amnesia on the skirts of the fantastic; her sf novel, Scarabaeus: The Story of an African Beetle (1892) with James Clarence Harvey (1865-1945), features a camera capable of photographing the past (see Time Viewer), a scene in which retinal images identify a murderer (a commonplace of ...
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 ...