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Thursday 20 August 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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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld (see Flat Earth) resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the ...
Ransom, Bill
(1945- ) US author who has worked as a medic and as a firefighter. His early writing was poetry, with several volumes released from Finding True North & Critter (coll 1974 chap) onward. He began publishing sf anonymously with "Songs of a Sentient Flute" in Analog for February 1979, a collaboration with Frank Herbert published as by Herbert alone: Ransom wrote the first draft at Herbert's ...
Jones, K C
(? - ) US screenwriter and author whose first novel, Black Tide (2022), treats Near Future First Contact in terms of Horror in SF, as seen via two protagonists who, after a one-night stand, must face an apocalyptic new world, with strong hints of the end of civilization as Homo sapiens has claimed to know it (see ...
Lynn, Grey
Pseudonym of an untraced author (? - ), though some circumstantial evidence points to a tentative identification. Grey Lynn, an inner-city district of Auckland, New Zealand, was the birthplace of Felix (Runcie) Kelly (1914-1994), an artist who moved in 1935 to the UK, where his work was espoused by Herbert Read, who commissioned him to illustrate the 1946 edition of his sf novel, The Green Child (1935), and ...
Thomas, Chauncey
(1822-1898) US author of a Technocratic Utopia, The Crystal Button; Or Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth Century (1891); the text was apparently drafted in the 1870s, and only submitted for publication after the success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), when it was edited by George Houghton (of Houghton, Mifflin and Company). The protagonist, ...
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 ...