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Friday 11 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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Nagata, Linda
(1960- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Spectral Expectations" in Analog for April 1987, and who rapidly established a reputation for swiftly told, shapely, Internet-savvy Hard SF tales set in worlds drenched in Nanotechnologies, much of this work being assembled as Goddesses and Other Stories (coll 2012), ...
Page, Thomas
(1942- ) US author whose first novel was The Hephaestus Plague (1973), filmed as Bug (1975), a tale which starts strongly, with vivid descriptions of the effect of an irruption from Underground of a new species of beetle capable of emitting fire, but which weakens when it begins to deal with a Scientist who becomes overfascinated with these beetles, which seem to ...
Richards, Charles Napier
(? -? ) UK author of an sf novel, Atalanta; Or, Twelve Months in the Evening Star (1909), whose five protagonists experiment in Space Flight with a ship whose complex new Power Source – the Invention of one of them – works as an Antigravity device. They reach Venus, one hemisphere ...
Alexander, Karl
(1944-2015) US film set worker – as cameraman, electrician, gaffer, grip etc – and author whose first novel was Time After Time (1979), a Time Travel romp in which Jack the Ripper evades pursuit in 1893 by stealing the Time Machine described and here constructed by H G Wells, travelling through time to 1979 San Francisco (see ...
Evans, Christopher [2]
(1951- ) Welsh-born UK chemist, teacher and author who has published sf and fantasy novels under his own name and as Christopher Carpenter, Nathan Elliott, Robert Knight and John Lyon, and some non-genre fiction as by Evan Christie and Alwyn Davies. His first publications, released more or less simultaneously, were the rather bad Plasmid: A Novelization (1980) as by Robert Knight, a Tie to an untraceable (and perhaps unmade) movie, ...
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 ...