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Monday 10 February 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 10 February 2025
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Nagayama Yasuo
(1962- ) Japanese dentist and historian, author of several dozen works on varied non-genre or Equipoisal subjects, including true crime, youth culture and modern parenting. Nagayama rose to prominence in the field of sf criticism in the early twenty-first century, as editor of several compilations of early Japanese genre work (including a collection of Jūza Unno's stories), ...
Kluge, Alexander
(1932- ) German film maker, controversialist and author, most of his fiction (around a thousand titles) being in the form of the short story. He is of sf interest for Lernprozesse mit tödlichem Ausgang (coll 1973; trans Christopher Pavsek of title novel only as Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome 1996), set partly in a Ruined Earth venue, some time after ...
Amano Yoshitaka
(1952- ) Japanese artist, rare in the contemporary medium for eschewing the Manga cash-cow in favour of portraiture, book illustration and design. Amano's early work, while still in his teens, was at the Tatsunoko Anime studio, where he soon rose to the rank of character designer establishing the baseline images from which the pool of animators would create the animation itself on shows such as ...
Inca-Pancho-Ozollo
Pseudonym of US architect, civil engineer and author Alfred Francis Sears (1826-1911), in Peru 1872-1880. His Lost Race novel, The Lost Inca: a Tale of Discovery in the Vale of the Inti-Mayu (1889) [for full title see Checklist below], carries its protagonist into the heart of Peru, where the descendants of Manco-Capac, last of the Incas – having escaped destruction at the hands of the white invaders – have created a ...
Round Robin
Round-robin stories, in which multiple authors take turns to write sections or chapters of a continuous narrative, generally tend to be games played for the writers' own amusement rather than serious fictional enterprises. Such playful collaborations date back to the nineteenth century. One non-sf instance which had some modest commercial success was the very British mystery novel The Floating Admiral (1931) by "Certain Members of the Detection Club"; there were thirteen ...
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 ...