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Friday 12 December 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.
Site updated on 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
American Comics Group
US Comics publisher founded in 1939 by Benjamin W Sangor, based in New York and at first informally known as the Sangor Shop. It operated as ACG from 1948 to 1967 and ceased as an independent publisher in 1968. Titles with entries in this encyclopedia are: Adventures into the Unknown; Commander Battle and the Atomic Sub; ...
Mighty Peking Man, The
Hong Kong film (1977). Original title Xīngxing Wáng; vt Goliathon; vt Colossus of the Congo. Shaw Brothers Studio. Directed by Ho Meng Hua. Written by Ni Kuang. Cast includes Ku Feng, Evelyne Kraft and Danny Lee. 90 minutes. Colour. / A Hong Kong businessman (Feng) plans to capture the Peking Man, here a 50-foot ape (see Apes as Human), who had been seen in the Indian Himalayas a few ...
Kooistra, Jeffery D
(1959- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Love, Dad" in Analog for March 1992, and has been one of the two contributors to the same magazine's column The Alternate View since 1998. His fiction is usually describable as clear-headed Hard SF; his first novel, Dykstra's War (fixup 2000), focuses on a traditional protagonist – the eponymous ...
Cooper, Richard
(1930-1998) UK author, mostly of scripts for children's television series, including Code Name Icarus (1984), a very Near Future tale about the exploitation of gifted children which he novelized as Code Name Icarus (1984), and Knights of God (1987), which he novelized as Knights of God (1987); the story is set in the year 2020, in an England ruled by a narrow theocracy whose leader is named, significantly, ...
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 ...