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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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Roberts, Willo Davis
(1928-2004) US author of books for adults, many of them nonsupernatural horror and gothics, and for children, including one Young Adult tale of sf interest, The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980), in which a group of mothers, having been given experimental drugs, give birth to Mutant children. The young protagonist must choose whether or not to expose her ESP powers to an unfriendly world. ...
Crumey, Andrew
(1961- ) Scottish journalist, editor and author whose first novel, Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), which inaugurates the extremely loose Music series, is set in an abstractly conceived Near Future Dystopian Britain, where a series of recursively ludic events – some conducted through the means of imaginary books (Crumey's oeuvre being full of them) – decomposes the ...
Priest, Christopher
(1943-2024) UK author, first trained as an accountant; active in Fanzines and Fandom from 1964; married 1981-1987 to Lisa Tuttle, 1988-2011 to Leigh Kennedy, and partner of Nina Allan from 2011 (they married in 2023). He published several Ties under various pseudonyms, only two of which he formally acknowledged: John ...
Kirk, Pauline
(? - ) UK poet and author of The Keepers (1996), a Dystopia set in a Near Future UK run by the eponymous Keepers on lines mildly evocative of George Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four (1949), with fairly rife regimentation and some brainwashing. But a dissident group imports a virus into the Keeper's central ...
Fantastic Fears
US Comic (1953-1954). Nine issues (but see below). Four Star publications. Artists include Jack Abel, Steve Ditko, the Iger Shop and Robert Webb. Writers of scripts include Bruce Hamilton and Ruth Roche. Usually four strips and a two-page text story per issue. / Fantastic Fears featured Horror stories, mostly with supernatural elements, but some were borderline sf. For instance, #2 has ...
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 ...