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Wednesday 11 February 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.
Site updated on 9 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Sladen, Douglas
(1856-1947) UK academic, poet, editor and author, in Australia 1879-1884, in UK subsequently. Much of his academic and creative life reflected his years in Australia; his anthologies of Australian poetry were influential, and his long advocacy of the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870) generated studies, editions, and his only sustained sf novel, Fair Inez: A Romance of Australia (1918), set in the Utopian Australia of 2000-2007 CE, and featuring ...
Hyde, Mark Powell
(1881-1952) US author in whose Young Adult novel, The Strange Inventor: A Curious Adventure Story (1927), Merlin Time Travels incognito to the twentieth century, where he meets the young protagonist, and amazes him with the engineless car (another of his Inventions) in which he carries him away. The two visit the future, where adventures are had, and the past, ditto. Merlin himself is a ...
Monsters
Monsters have always stalked the hinterlands of the imagination, emblems of fear and symbols of guilt. They commonly take their aspects and roles from the supernatural imagination (see Supernatural Creatures); but the scientific imagination has produced many monsters of its own. The recruitment to the Horror story of monsters spawned by Nature was pioneered by H G Wells's classic alien- ...
Hughes, Zach
Working name for much of his sf of US author Hugh Zachary (1928-2016), who also used various other pseudonyms for sf, including Evan Innes, Peter Kanto, Pablo Kane and Marcus Van Heller; he used his real name for other work from 1961 on, at least 100 titles in all. His novels in the sf field were expertly devised and readable and frequently surprisingly dark in their implications. The Book of Rack the Healer (July/August-September/October 1972 If; 1973) and ...
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 ...