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Thursday 12 March 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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Drummond, June
(1923-2011) South African author, in London for several years in the 1950s. She wrote almost exclusively detective novels and Regency romances; one of the former, The Gantry Episode (1968; vt Murder on a Bad Trip 1968), edges into sf in its investigation of the planting of the Drug LSD in a reservoir and of the effects thereof. [JC/DRL] see also: Urban Legends. /
Odgers, Sally
(1957- ) Australian author, who has also written as by Sally Farrell, Tiffany Mandrake and Sally Farrell Odgers; most of her work has been for younger readers and/or fantasy, such as the long Jack Russell, Dog Detective sequence beginning with The Lying Postman (2005 chap) with Darrell Odgers, or the variously shared volumes of the Out of this World sequence beginning with Slime World (2007 chap) [none are listed below]. The ...
System Shock
Videogame (1994). Looking Glass Studios (LG). Designed by Doug Church. Platforms: DOS (1994); Mac (1995). / System Shock is an early First Person Shooter much influenced by Computer Role Playing Games. It is set in a Cyberpunk world, with gameplay which combines puzzle solution, exploration and combat. ...
Winterson, Jeanette
(1959- ) UK author, much of whose work juggles elements out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize deeply held arguments about Gender (see also Feminism); as her work edges constantly into the allegorical it is, however, not easy to think of her as a natural author of the fantastic, though her work is too various and transgressive for her to be categorized as a ...
Fenn, George Manville
(1831-1909) UK teacher, publisher, editor and author, of whose 170 or more novels and collections, mostly for the Young Adult market, some are of sf interest, including The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas (1884), a Lost Race tale set in South America; The Man With a Shadow (1888 3vols), in which a Mad Scientist's attempts to generate a state of ...
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 ...