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Sunday 12 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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Jerrold, Douglas [2]
(1803-1857) UK playwright, columnist, magazine proprietor and editor much involved throughout his life in the London literary scene; great-grandfather of Douglas Jerrold (1893-1964). A regular contributor to Punch, often pseudonymously, from the second issue of the magazine in 1841 until his death. At his funeral in 1857 Charles Dickens was one of the pall-bearers. Little of his work is within ...
Rimel, Duane W
(1915-1996) US poet and author of some short fiction, some of it with H P Lovecraft; his sf novel, Time Swap (1969) as by Rex Weldon, combines Time Travel and Sex. [JC]
Emerson, Willis George
(1856-1918) US criminal entrepreneur and author, involved in at least one mining fraud and a stock fraud late in life, the latter involving the Emerson Motor Company, whose cars were disguised Fords. Most of his novels were Westerns, whose Lost World novel The Smoky God, or A Voyage to the Inner World (1908; vt as coll, The Smoky God and Other Inner Earth Mysteries 1993) is set in 1829 in a ...
Hill, Russell
(1935- ) US author whose sf novel, Cold Creek Cash Store (1986; vt The Edge of the Earth 1992), follows its protagonist to a Post-Holocaust refuge in Nevada centred around the eponymous general store; attempts to begin to rebuild civilization seem hopeful. [JC]
Binge, Nicholas
(? - ) Singapore-born author since resident in Switzerland, Hong Kong and the UK. His first novel, Professor Everywhere (2020), which is told in the form of a thesis by its protagonist, lightly academicizes her search for the titular professor, who after having generated a planetary catastrophe seems to manifest himself everywhere; he is perhaps best described as a kind of Secret Master playing a ...
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 ...