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Tuesday 13 October 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 12 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Jones, Holly Goddard
(1979- ) US author, much of whose earlier work, which is nonfantastic, consists of intense studies of life in her native Kentucky, with some emphasis on its occasionally violent noir underside. She is of sf interest for her second novel, The Salt Line (2017), set in a Near Future America distorted into a Dystopian tyranny through the effects of a continent-wide assault of ticks. That this is not ...
Skinner, Michael
(1953- ) US journalist, editor and author, mostly of nonfiction books about the American military during the 1980s. Of sf interest is the Near Future Technothriller First Air: A Novel of Air Combat in the Persian Gulf (1991), set after Iran has nuked Baghdad, trapping American forces who can only be rescued by a maverick private corporation whose advanced planes are operated by madcap fighter ...
General Semantics
A quasi-philosophical movement founded in Chicago in 1938 by Count Alfred Korzybski, whose Science and Sanity (1933) was the basic handbook of the movement. General Semantics had a surprising success, peaking in the 1940s and 1950s. It teaches that first unsanity and later insanity are caused by adherence to an Aristotelian worldview, by which is meant the use of the two-valued either-or logic which Korzybski saw as being built into ...
Fagan, Oisin
(?1991- ) Irish author whose first book, The Hierophants (2016 chap), a self-reflexive fable conspicuously evocative of the work of Flann O'Brien. His first full-length title, Hostages (coll of linked stories 2016), exuberantly mixes Irish Mythology, spoofed Myth of Origin tropes [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under ...
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 ...