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Thursday 12 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.
Site updated on 9 June 2025
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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Repton, Humphry
(1752-1818) UK landscape gardener, of great significance as theorist and practitioner, his successful gardens expressing an early Romantic sense of the picturesque, in contrast to the domineering formalism of earlier styles. He is of sf interest for one short story, "From a Private Mad-House" (in Variety: A Collection of Essays: Written in the Year 1787, anth 1788), which was republished as "Voyage to the Moon" (in Odd Whims; And Miscellanies, coll 1804 2vols), in ...
Gold, Joe
(1960- ) US author of The Lamp Post Motel (2006), a Time Travel novel in which Anthropologists from the future punitively transfer the mind of a motel owner into the bodies of those he himself is accustomed – as though he were an anthropologist himself – to observe. [JC]
Matthews, Ronald
(1903-1967) UK journalist, noted foreign correspondent, and author of a Dystopia, Red Sky at Night (1951), a Near Future tale in which a leftist tyranny is overthrown by a Roman Catholic crusade. [JC]
Andrews, Scott K
(1971- ) Author, apparently UK and also writing as Scott Andrews, of a guide to the Television series, Farscape (1999-2003, 2005): Uncharted Territory: An Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Farscape (2002). He has also contributed three volumes to the Shared World The Afterblight Chronicles (see The ...
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 ...