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Monday 9 February 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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Sallis, James
(1944-2026) US musician, poet and author, briefly active in New Worlds during its Michael Moorcock-directed New-Wave phase; he began to publish work of genre interest in this context with "Kazoo" (August 1967 New Worlds) and co-edited the magazine 1968-1969. His clearly acknowledged models in the French avant garde and the gnomic brevity of much of his work ...
Krohn, Leena
(1947- ) Finnish author whose first novels were composed for younger readers, an example being Ihmisen vaatteissa: Kertomus kaupungilta (1976; trans Bethany Fox as "The Pelican's New Clothes: A Story from the City" in Collected Fiction 2015), whose young protagonist experiences a magical City through his relationship with the eponymous talking bird. Krohn's focus on multivariant experiences of urban life [for Beast ...
Finlay, Iain
(1935- ) Australian journalist and author whose sf novel, The Azanian Assignment (1978), is set in a Near Future South Africa weakened by guerrilla assaults, seemingly from Tanzania; the end of apartheid clearly looms. [JC]
Cole, Cornelius
(1822-1924) US politician – at his death he was the oldest former American Senator – lawyer, newspaperman and author, whose only novel, California Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago: Manuelo's Narrative Translated from the Portuguese by a Pioneer (1888) anonymous, describes in prose (and occasional verse) the discovery of a Lost World in California in the sixteenth century. [JC]
Nau, John-Antoine
Pseudonym of US-born poet and author Eugène Léon Édouard Torquet (1860-1918), in France from 1866, his life from this point until his death being unusually peripatetic. His only published novel, La Force Ennemie (1903; trans Michael Shreve as Enemy Force 2010), which won the first Prix Goncourt in 1903, is of sf interest. Embedding its central premise in a jungle-jim of imagery from the surreal edge of Fantastika, ...
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 ...