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Wednesday 13 May 2026
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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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Maxwell, Everina
(? - ) UK author whose first novel, The Course of Honor (2017 ebook; rev vt Winter's Orbit 2021), is a Space Opera where individual planets are bunched into local empires which have themselves been coordinated into a defensive network known as the Resolution. At the verge of a renewal of this network, marital upsets, and some gender insecurities (see Sex), threaten the ...
Barton, William R
(1950- ) US author who has concentrated for most of his career on sf novels set in Space Opera arenas; within this normally expansive frame, he tends to focus on intimate venues, where stressful interactions amongst sometimes dysfunctional characters give a dark, closet-drama feel to his tales. His first novel, however, Hunting on Kunderer (1973), traditionally confronts humans with Alien natives on ...
Munro, John
(1849-1930) UK engineer, professor of mechanical engineering at Bristol, and author of three tales of sf interest, "Sun-Rise in the Moon" (October 1894 Cassell's Magazine), "A Message from Mars" (March 1895 Cassell's Family Magazine) and A Trip to Venus (1897, incorporating "A Message from Mars" above as chapter one). The novel is an unexceptional account of a journey by Spaceship – powered by a new ...
Callenbach, Ernest
(1929-2012) US environmentalist, film critic and author whose own Banyan Tree Books published his first novel, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (1974 American Review #19 as "First Days in Ecotopia"; exp 1975), after it had been refused by several professional houses; it was reported in the mid-1980s to have sold more than 300,000 copies, which should come as no surprise given the reasoned seductiveness of 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 ...