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Sunday 22 June 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Applin, Arthur
(1873-1949) UK aviator in World War One, playwright and author whose Near Future sf tale, The Priest of Piccadilly (1910) offers the worry that Britain might be taken over through a revolution fomented by a demagogue. [JC]
Evans, Gerald
(1910-1986) Welsh telecommunications worker and author, who began publishing sf with "Pebbles of Dread" for Thrilling Wonder Stories in August 1940, and who wrote one sf adventure, The Black Sphere (1952) as by Victor La Salle, a House Name. A later collection, Shadows in Landore: The Collected Stories of Gerald Evans, Volume 1 (coll 1979 chap), was self-published; no further ...
Quest for Love
Film (1971). Peter Rogers Productions. Directed by Ralph Thomas. Written by Terence Feely, based on "Random Quest" (in Consider Her Ways and Others, coll 1961) by John Wyndham. Cast includes Tom Bell, Joan Collins, Denholm Elliott and Laurence Naismith. 91 minutes. Colour. / Romance about a physicist (Bell) accidentally transferred to a Parallel World, where he falls in love with the wife (Collins) of ...
Quotations
Sf has long suffered from the perception that its authors are characteristically excellent creators of ideas but clunky prose stylists, suggesting that the genre – and by inference the larger body of texts comprising Fantastika into which sf complexly fits – may not be distinguished by an abundance of well-turned phrases. Still, there are any number of statements by Genre SF writers and others, in stories and articles, that ...
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 ...