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Saturday 12 July 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.
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Laßwitz, Kurd
(1848-1910) German Kantean philosopher, historian of science, author and short-story author; the German form of his surname, Laßwitz, is usually rendered in English as Lasswitz. He began to publish work of interest with "Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins" ["To the Zero Point of Existence"] (21-24 May 1871 Schlesische Zeitung); along with a second sf novella, this depiction of life in 2371 was assembled as ...
Shelton, Frederick William
(1814/1815-1881) US minister and author whose first book, The Trollopiad; Or, Travelling Gentleman in America (1837) as by Nil Admirari, Esq, is an essentially nonfantastic verse Satire on Frances Trollope (1780-1863). Of very moderate sf interest is Salander and the Dragon: A Romance of the Hartz Prison (1850), a Lost Race tale unduly reminiscent of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678). ...
Hardy, Jason M
(? - ) US author of some Ties connected to the Battletech Wargame, beginning with MechWarrior: Dark Age: The Scorpion Jar (2004); he has also contributed Shadowrun: Drops of Corruption (2006) to the Shadowrun world. [JC]
Norman, Lisanne
(1951- ) UK author active in UK Fandom from 1978, and author of some short fiction. Her career has been dominated, however, by the Sholan Alliance sequence, beginning with Turning Point (1993) and ending with Circle's End (2017), a set of Planetary Romance tales within a Space Opera setting which gives an opportunity for the introduction of ...
Shiner, Lewis
(1950- ) US musician and author who began publishing sf with "Tinker's Damn" for Galileo #5 in October 1977, and who wrote a substantial number of tales before beginning to assemble them in Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (coll 1990), The Edges of Things (coll 1991) and Love in Vain (coll 2001). His Collected Stories (coll 2010) conveniently assembles more than half of ...
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 ...