SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 9 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.
Site updated on 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, 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 ...
Blommedaal, Laurens J
(1956- ) Dutch-born UK author whose The Desperado of the Metal (1991) follows the adventures of a Cyberpunk protagonist through a noir Near Future Britain on the brink of extinction. [JC]
Schofield, Alfred Taylor
(1846-1929) UK medical doctor and author whose nonfiction was divided between technical medical studies and hortatory guides to Christianity; his sf tales are Thought Experiments in the nineteenth century manner, where such narratives are more likely to teach than to explore. Travels in the Interior, or The Wonderful Adventures of Luke and Belinda: Edited by a London Physician (1887) as by Luke Theophilus Courteney carries its protagonists, ...
Antheil, George
(1900-1959) US composer, performer and author, best known for the glaringly avant-garde Ballet Mécanique (1923-1924), originally conceived as a score for a nineteen-minute experimental film directed by Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and Dudley Murphy (1897-1968), but soon detached from that project and expanded. The rhetorical (and in some performances actually staged) transfiguration of human participants into Dadaist, surreally Robot-like ...
Howes, Katelyn Monroe
(? - ) US documentary and Television producer, all of nonfantastic work, and author whose first novel, The Awoken (2022), re-invokes a question often found in the SF Megatext: why would anyone awoken from Suspended Animation be welcome in the new world? In this case, the protagonist has been re-activated into an estranging ...
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 ...