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Wednesday 9 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.
Site updated on 7 July 2025
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Blake, Nicholas
Pseudonym of Irish-born UK poet and author Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) for his thrillers and detective novels, most of them featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways. Of these, The Smiler with the Knife (summer 1939 News Chronicle; 1939), the fifth in the Nigel Strangeways sequence, is of sf interest as a dreadful-warning tale, set in Near Future England, where a Nazi-inspired coup by Fascist aristocrats is very narrowly averted. The ...
Rhodes, H Henry
(? -? ) US author of Where Men Have Walked: A Story of the Lucayos (1909), a complex Lost Race whose protagonist – trapped after dark adventures on a mysterious Island – spelunks deep Underground, where a strange figure Timeslips by trance backwards to a much earlier age, where an electricity-worshipping ...
Gannett, Lewis
(1952- ) US author whose first novel was a falteringly effective horror tale, The Living One (1993), and whose second was Magazine Beach (1996), a Near Future thriller whose villains, after hijacking the world's information networks (see Internet), plan to melt the polar icecaps, perhaps impatient at the pace of global warming (see Climate Change). ...
Demure One, The
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? - ) of a Future War tale in the Battle of Dorking mode about the Invasion of the UK by France, via the much-dreaded Channel Tunnel, The Battle of Boulogne: Or How Calais Became English Again: Another Version of the Channel Tunnel Affair (1882 chap). [JC]
Defiance [game]
Videogame (2013). Trion Worlds. Platforms: PS3, Win, XB360. / The Television series Defiance (2013-current) is set on a near future Earth which has been transformed into an alien frontier. In the programme's backstory a civilization made up of diverse alien species arrives from another star, looking for a new home after the destruction of their own solar system. (The most prominent writer for the show, Rockne ...
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 ...