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Monday 13 April 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.
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Reed, Ishmael
(1938- ) US poet, playwright and author, who emerged in the 1960s as a central representative of the New Black Aesthetic movement, and a figure controversial to the Black critical establishment from the publication of his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), a powerful Satire in which America is visualized as the digestive system of a cannibal used-car salesman. Yellow-Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), a ...
Millar, Martin
(1956- ) Scottish author whose first novel, Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation (1987), is a gonzo depiction of downmarket countercultural life in 1980s Britain, edging close to the fantastic in its depiction of intersections between Comics, Drugs and Videogames; it does not, however quite venture over the borderline. Lux the Poet (1988), set in a very similar ...
Zola, Émile
(1840-1902) French author whose long and intense Rougon-Macquart sequence of Naturalist novels (1871-1893) includes tales like Nana (1880; trans E A Vizetelly 1884), for which he was once notorious. Zola is of sf interest for Vérité (1903 2vols; trans E A Vizetelly as Truth 1903), the third instalment of his unfinished Les Quatre Évangiles ["The Four Evangelists"] quartet, which was planned to espouse a kind of ...
Huntley, Tim
(1939-2019) US author of an sf novel, One on Me (1980), which describes a Utopian world whose citizenry, packed into Keeps, has room for only one more child, the protagonist. Three further novels – the Earthgame sequence, all signed Timothy Wade Huntley and comprising Earthgame: A Player's Guide (1999), Tidwell's Spirit (2002), and The Great God Awshi (2006) – are ...
Baruth, Philip
(? - ) US politician, academic, journalist and author of sf interest for The X President (2003), a Satire set in an Alternate History version of 2055, the Jonbar Point being Bill Clinton's 1990s dishonourable conciliation of the tobacco companies, which has led by stages to the current Cigarette Wars with America pitted against Russia and China. ...
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 ...