SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 15 July 2025
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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Macnee, Patrick
(1922-2015) UK actor (a US citizen from 1982) best known for playing the supremely suave, stylish and very British secret agent John Steed who with a succession of tough but glamorous female partners is pitted against numerous sf threats and ploys in The Avengers (1961-1969) and its successor The New Avengers (1976-1977). He receives sole cover credit for the Avengers Ties Deadline (1965) ...
Acworth, Andrew
(1857-1895) UK author – according to Darko Suvin, a barrister named Andrew Oswald Acworth – whose sf novel, A New Eden (1896), set 100 years in the future, features the escape of two depressed protagonists from the decaying republican UK, which has suffered from Devolution of the human stock, to an egalitarian but hidebound Island Utopia which fails ...
Clinton, George
(?1940- ) US funk musician, famous for his two connected groups, Parliament and Funkadelic. Many of the musicians from these collectives played on albums released under Clinton's name as solo albums. Computer Games (1982) has been especially heavily sampled by subsequent hip-hop and funk acts (the track "Atomic Dog" in particular); and the title track of You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish ...
Wingrove, David
(1954- ) UK critic and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Photographs" in Focus for Spring 1980, though he has written very little short fiction since, some of it as by Fara Jackson. His career has broken into two logical sequences. Initially he concentrated on critical work, the earliest significant example of which – The Immortals of Science Fiction (1980) – was printed but never officially released, due to the ...
Kooistra, Jeffery D
(1959- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Love, Dad" in Analog for March 1992, and has been one of the two contributors to the same magazine's column The Alternate View since 1998. His fiction is usually describable as clear-headed Hard SF; his first novel, Dykstra's War (fixup 2000), focuses on a traditional protagonist – the eponymous ...
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 ...