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Sunday 7 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Year of the Sex Olympics, The
UK tv drama (1968). British Broadcasting Corporation. Directed by Michael Elliott. Written by Nigel Kneale. Cast includes Brian Cox, George Murcell, Suzanne Neve, Martin Potter, Lesley Roach, Leonard Rossiter, Hira Talfrey, Vickery Turner and Tony Vogel. 103 minutes. Black and white (original colour print wiped by BBC). / Long thought lost or irretrievably mutilated, The Year of the Sex Olympics was released in 2020 by the ...
Destination Inner Space
Film (1966). United Pictures/Harold Goldman/Magna. Directed by Francis Lynch. Written by Arthur C Pierce. Cast includes Scott Brady, Gary Merrill, Sheree North and Mike Road. 83 minutes. Colour. / This minuscule-budget sf film is set in a research station Under the Sea whose Scientists discover a sunken Alien Spaceship and are menaced by its freed occupant, an ...
Silver, R Norman
Pseudonym of UK author George Knight (? -? ). Novels of sf interest under this name include The Golden Dwarf: A Sensational Romance of Today (1903), in which a Mad Scientist attempts – surgically, as in H G Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) – to transform young children into dwarfs and giants (see ...
Joad, C E M
(1891-1953) UK philosopher, broadcaster and author, a senior civil servant during World War One, and thus exempt from service. His public loucheness and transgressive atheism, as well as a sustained advocacy of free love, enliven much of his nonfiction, including his two contributions to the To-day and To-morrow series [for titles see Checklist below] and in The Dictator Resigns (1936), where his advocacy ...
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 ...