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Thursday 19 June 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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Mashina Vremeni
Russian rock band (the name means Time Machine) founded by Andrei Makarevich (1953- ) and Aleksandr Kutikov (1952- ). Mashina Vremeni are, by all accounts, extremely popular in their homeland although little known outside it; and their music works within an attractively Beatle-y or "Adult Oriented Rock" idiom. Amongst their many releases is the concept album Malenkiy printz (1979), an adaptation ...
Zhao, Xiran Jay
(1997- ) Chinese-born author, in Canada from about the age of ten; they are of sf interest for the Iron Widow sequence beginning with the Young Adult Iron Widow (2021), where visual topoi from Anime enliven with deliberately garish exuberance an otherwise downbeat narrative. In a long fight against Mecha bent on ...
Smith, Clint
(? - ) US technical writer and author of Infusion (2004), a tale combining aspects of Space Opera – two Consortium planets band together to send an expedition to Earth to plunder it of its "dattan", a resource needed back home – and Ecological fiction: the approaching crisis is seen through from the perspective of a galactic team whose task it is to prevent the ...
York, J Steven
(1957- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Starbird" (in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Volume V, anth 1989, ed Algis Budrys), and who concentrated on Ties for various enterprises: for the Marvel Comics Generation X series beginning with Generation X: Crossroads (1998); for the ...
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 ...