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Wednesday 16 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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Coates, Robert M
(1897-1973) US author, primarily associated throughout his career with The New Yorker, for which he worked, and to which he contributed many stories. He is mainly of interest to the sf field for his first novel, The Eater of Darkness (1926; rev 1929), which, written before he had fully assimilated the sometimes restrictive urbanity of The New Yorker style, quite brilliantly applies a wide arsenal of literary devices and references, some of the more nihilistic ...
Davies, Pete
(1959- ) UK advertising copywriter (until the mid 1980s) and author whose first novel, The Last Election (1986), depicts with singular ferocity a Near-Future Dystopian UK ruled by the Money Party and its senile Nanny, a savage portrait of the 1980s British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher; Overpopulation and the total loss of a manufacturing base lead to the ...
Ruined Earth
Term used in this encyclopedia for the longer-range sf aftermath of Disaster and Holocaust scenarios. First comes the cataclysm, then the Post-Holocaust struggle with a general emphasis on survival and adaptation. If humanity avoids extinction, the details of past technology and the fall of civilization are apt to become increasingly blurred – and often mythologized – with each new ...
Doubleday
US general publisher which in the 1950s was one of the first US hardcover houses to institute an sf line, an early title being Pebble in the Sky (1950), which was Isaac Asimov's first novel. (The Doubleday imprint, Doubleday and Company, Inc, should not be confused with that of their associated company, Nelson Doubleday, Inc, publishers of the US Science Fiction Book Club.) Once the Doubleday line was ...
Aphelion
1. Australian magazine, Summer 1985/6 to Summer 1986/7, five issues, edited by Peter McNamara (1947-2004) from Adelaide, A4-size, quarterly on coated stock. One of many short-lived, quixotic Australian attempts to produce a viable professional sf magazine, Aphelion soon failed, but honourably. Good stories by George Turner, Greg Egan, Rosaleen Love and, most often, Terry ...
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 ...