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Thursday 17 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 16 July 2025
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Williams, Tess
(1954-2025) UK-born teacher, editor and author, in Australia for many years, there receiving a degree in literature from Curtin University and an MA in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Padwan Affair" in She's Fantastical (anth 1995) edited by Judith Raphael Buckrich and Lucy Sussex. Of sf interest are two novels: Map of Power (1996), set mostly in a ...
FTL: Faster Than Light
Videogame (2012). Subset Games. Platforms: Win, Mac, Lin, iOS. / FTL: Faster Than Light is a Roguelike videogame in which the player pilots a rebel spacecraft, The Kestrel, through a number of galaxies in order to deliver vital information to a Galactic Federation that lies eight sectors away. / The game is a top-down strategy and management resource game (in "top-down" games, the player looks directly ...
Barlow, Joel
(1754-1812) US diplomat and author, mostly abroad, in France and the UK and elsewhere, from 1788. He is of sf interest for his book-length patriotic poem (see Poetry), The Vision of Columbus: A Poem in Nine Books (1787; exp vt The Columbiad 1807 2vols), the first version of this narrative being a Christian, conservative, nationalistic attempt to create an American Myth of Origin [see The ...
Hill, Headon
Pseudonym of UK journalist and author Francis Edward Grainger (1857-1927), who mostly wrote nonfantastic thrillers and police procedurals. The Spies of the Wight (1899), which describes a threatened Invasion of England, edges into the very Near Future; the novel-length title story assembled in Seaward for the Foe (coll 1903) is a Future War tale in which England is pitted ...
Kip, Leonard
(1826-1906) US lawyer and author, much of whose work reflects his experiences in the California Gold Rush of 1849; though some of his novels contain trace elements of the supernatural, he is of interest here mainly for Hannibal's Man (1873 chap), a Sleeper Awakes tale in which a truculent Carthaginian is aroused from a glacier, which is included in Hannibal's Man and other Tales: The Argus Christmas Stories (coll 1878). Along with ...
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 ...