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Tuesday 13 May 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 12 May 2025
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Fabian, Stephen E
(1930-2025) American artist, sometimes credited as Steve Fabian or simply Fabian. The self-trained Fabian first worked as an electronic engineer, but he began contributing art to Fanzines in the late 1960s and became a full-time professional artist in 1973. He did a number of covers and interior art for SF Magazines, mostly Amazing, Fantastic, and ...
Ahmed, Samira
(? - ) Indian-born author in US from childhood, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Brains Don't Smell" in Entropy Mag for 2016. She is of sf interest for her second novel, the Young-Adult Interment (2019), set in an American very Near Future difficult to distinguish from the tale's year of publication. Young men and women identified as ethnically unsound ...
Hyams, Peter
(1943- ) US cinema director, producer and cinematographer, formerly a jazz drummer and television news anchorman; his first directed film of genre interest was Capricorn One (1977), which he also wrote: an exercise in Paranoia in which, with the unwise cooperation of NASA, a Mars mission is faked (Hyams is fond of government-based conspiracies). The next and perhaps his best is ...
Mead, Harold
(1910-1997) Indian-born author, in the UK from an early age. The first and better known of his sf novels, The Bright Phoenix (1955), is a sombrely told Ruined Earth tale in which a reestablished but over-regimented Utopian culture tries unsuccessfully to reinhabit abandoned parts of the Earth; it ends a little sentimentally with a Second Coming. The other, Mary's Country (1957), tells of the quest of a ...
McKay, Laura Jean
(1978- ) Australian author whose very Near Future novel, The Animals in That Country (2020), which won the Arthur C Clarke Award, describes a planetary Pandemic whose most radical effect is an opening of the gates of Perception – and, it may be, actual language (see Communication; ...
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 ...