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Sunday 7 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Bickerton, Derek
(1926-2018) US linguist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii; of marginal sf interest, but a cognitively intriguing examination of the problems of Communication between species, King of the Sea (1979), tells of the experiences of a man who lives with Dolphins. [JC]
Paterson, Isabel
(1886-1961) Canadian journalist, literary critic and author, in the US from around 1915, whose The God of the Machine (1943) originated many of the tenets of libertarianism (see Libertarian SF) whose intellectual interactions with Ayn Rand from the 1930s on were mutually influential. Of her fiction, The Road of the Gods (1930) is a Lost Race novel set in Germany 2,000 ...
Russell, William Moy
(1925-2006) UK biologist and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Three Brothers" in the London Observer for December 1954, but who concentrated on his scientific career after that point. His The Barber of Aldebaran (1995) is a spoof Space Opera in the first part of which the representative of Robotics Inc is called in to the planet Aldebaran, whose Robots have begun to malfunction; he then ...
Zelazny, Roger
(1937-1995) US author and poet, born in Ohio, with an MA from Columbia University in 1962. In 1962-1969 he was employed by the Social Security Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland; from 1969 he wrote full-time. His arrival in the sf world in 1962, at the same time as Samuel R Delany, Thomas M Disch and Ursula K Le Guin, marked that year as a milestone in what seemed ...
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 ...