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Sunday 14 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.
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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 ...
Kelley, William Melvin
(1937-2017) US author whose celebrated short novel A Different Drummer (1959) is an sf fable telling of Black history in an imaginary town in an imagined southern state of the USA (see Race in SF), and ending with a mass emigration of all Blacks from this state in 1957. The isolation of this town [for Polder see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] is reminiscent of the ...
LeVay, Simon
(1943- ) UK author of Albrick's Gold (1998), an sf Satire in which a "cure" for homosexual Sex impulses is introduced by a homophobe. [JC]
Edric, Robert
Pseudonym of UK author Gary Edric Armitage (1956- ), who began his career as G E Armitage with a nonfantastic novel, A Season of Peace (1985), continuing for two decades during which at least fifteen more novels, all but the first as Robert Edric, were released. They are all nonfantastic, though The Broken Lands (1992), about the fatal Arctic expedition headed by Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), pushes to the edge of ...
Rex the Runt
UK stop-frame animated tv series (1998-2001). Aardman Animations for BBC Bristol. Created by Richard Goleszowski (aka Richard Starzak). Executive producers: Paul Kofod, Peter Lord, Colin Rose, Michael Rose, David Sproxton and Tom Van Waveren. Writers include Andrew Franks, Richard Starzak and Kevin Wrench. Directors include Richard Starzak. Voice cast includes Steve Box, Andrew Franks, Elisabeth Hadley, Andrew Jeffers, Colin Rote and Kevin Wrench. 26 ten-minute episodes. Colour. / ...
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 ...