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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 ...
Kost, Bruce
(1950- ) US merchant sailor and author whose first novel, the Military SF tale Reclusive Authority (1998), carries a tough female into space with her elite male buddies to fight off Aliens; in The Youngblood Project (2002), which is a tale of Near Future justified Paranoia, a man is kidnapped by the CIA, forced to ingest a ...
Amazing Stories
"The magazine of scientifiction", with whose founding Hugo Gernsback announced the existence of sf as a distinct literary species. It was initially a letter-sized SF Magazine issued monthly by Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company as a companion to Science and Invention and Radio News, first issue dated April 1926, and was the first magazine to publish science fiction ...
Sykes, W Stanley
(1894-1961) UK anaesthesiologist and author, in active service during World War One. Most of his fiction comprises detective thrillers with no fantastic content; of sf interest is The Ray of Doom: A Detective Novel (1935), in which the eponymous Ray is presented with some scientific rigour. [JC]
Montgomerie, F W
(? -? ) Unidentified author, possibly the pseudonym of New Zealand scientist and author Frederick Wollaston Hutton (1836-1905), an early supporter of the theory of Evolution, married to Annie Gouger Montgomerie. Paying the Price (1907) follows the career of a Mad Scientist in Australia who develops a strain of plague to eliminate the weak (see Eugenics; ...
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 ...