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Thursday 11 December 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 8 December 2025
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Andrews, Graham
(1948- ) UK author and playwright, in Belgium from 1982, whose Darkness Audible (coll of linked stories 1991) features a sequence of sf and fantasy tales unconnected except for the fact that they are passing through the mind of a failed writer whose mental health is no longer secure; the collection could be described as a set of Club Stories told in Inner Space. A second sf collection is ...
Heroes
Gilgamesh may be the first named hero in what we think of as the Western World. Like him, most heroes in the cultures of the West are passionate, often rebellious, defenders of and bringers of relief to their homelands, and until perhaps Boudicca (floruit 60-61 CE) always male. They often descended from Gods (see Gods and Demons) but are distinct from them, like Hercules; even Prometheus, the paradigm culture hero in the Western tradition, is not a ...
Mitchell, Nicole
(1967- ) US flautist and composer, a member and past chair of Chicago's influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). As with many members of that organization, her prolific body of work bridges jazz, improvisation and classical composition. Her first sf-related works were a trilogy inspired by the writings of Octavia E Butler, all credited to Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble: Xenogenesis Suite ...
Hirose Tadashi
Pseudonym for jazz saxophonist and author Shōkichi Hirose (1924-1972), who came within a hair's breadth of winning mainstream literary awards in Japan on several occasions during his brief career as a crime and sf author. A former engineering student at Nihon University, he formed the band "Tadashi Hirose and the Sky Tones" in 1952, and only turned to writing after the debt-ridden group disbanded in 1960. His first published story was the non-sf "Koroshisō ...
Harryhausen, Ray
(1920-2013) US special-effects supervisor, long based in the UK, associated with many sf and fantasy films and the pioneering use of stop-motion animation. As a boy his main interests were sculpture and palaeontology. The desire to see his own clay figures move on the screen, aroused by King Kong (1933), stimulated his interest in photography and special effects. While Willis H O'Brien, who had animated King Kong, was ...
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 ...