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Tuesday 15 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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Hodge, T Shirby
Pseudonym of US author Roger Sherman Tracy (1841-1926). His sf novel, The White Man's Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), is set in 5000 CE, by which period the warlike and primitive white races (see Race in SF) have been restricted to North America while, in Black-dominated Africa, anarchism and scientific genius have generated a Utopian world. A white Invasion suffers ignominious defeat, and ...
Anam, Tahmima
(1975- ) Bangladeshi-born author, variously in France and elsewhere from childhood, in UK from about 2010. Her fiction, beginning with A Golden Age (2007), has been sharply topical, without any extraction of topoi from the fantastic. Her fourth novel, The Startup Wife (2021), set in the very Near Future water margins of Fantastika, traces the interweaving consequences of a married ...
Hypnerotomachia
Russian short silent animated film (1992; vt Hypnerotomahia). Pilot Moscow Animation Studio. Directed by Andrei Svislotsky. Written by Andrei Kolpin and Oleg Kuzovkov. 8 minutes. Colour. / A man, desiccated in appearance with too many teeth and eyes like scars, dreams of dawn unfurling across a landscape covered in towers. His face in profile, its eye opens, revealing the iris to be the sun casting the light. The towers' shadows move with the sun's ...
Spotswood, Claire Myers
(1896-1983) Working name of US author Clairene Lenora Allen Myers Owens for her first novel, and only work of sf interest, The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman's Independence (1935), a Utopia told in allegorical language. The protagonist, Tellectina Femina Christian, abandons Smug Harbor in the Land of Err for the Forbidden Kingdom of Nithking, where the two personae signalled by her given names become separate but incomplete individuals. Only ...
Morgan, Richard
(1965- ) British author who began publishing work of genre interest with Altered Carbon (2002) as by Richard K Morgan; the middle initial also appears on US reprints. Altered Carbon was the first of a three-volume sequence featuring the mercenary/detective Takeshi Kovacs, subsequent books being Broken Angels (2003) and Woken Furies (2005). The setting of the Kovacs sequence is a United Nations-supervised group 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 ...