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Sunday 13 July 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.
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MacLennan, Phyllis
(1920-2012) US translator, actor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Contract in Karasthan" for Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (see Fantastic) in July 1963, her best-known tale being "Thus Love Betrays Us" (September 1972 F&SF). Her sf novel, Turned Loose on Irdra (1970), subverts its orthodox frame – the protagonist is sent to a planet whose civilization (see ...
Hughes, Edward P
(? - ) US author – it has been speculated that he may be Welsh – who began publishing sf with "In the Name of the Father" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for September 1980, the first tale in his Liam McGrath sequence, which was continued in his first novel, The Long Mynd (1985), set in a Post-Holocaust world brought into being by ...
Tregaskis, Richard
(1916-1973) US war correspondent and author, best known for his first book, the nonfiction Guadalcanal Diary (1943). He is of sf interest for a Near Future Technothriller, China Bomb (1967), in which an elite team of commandos must dismantle a Chinese H-bomb before it can destroy the American Seventh Fleet. [JC]
Glück, Louise
(1943-2023) US academic, poet and author, active from the early 1960s. Her poetry, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020, has long been recognized for its capacity to plumb rich depths in language seemingly stripped of conventional "poetic" device. But chthonic analogues constantly well up through exposed cracks and illuminations, in works like Ararat (coll 1990 chap) or Averno (coll 2006 chap), though most strongly in ...
Darnay, Arsen
(1936- ) Hungarian-born author, in the USA from 1953 and a US citizen from 1961. His first sf story, "The Splendid Freedom", appeared in Galaxy in 1974; his first novel, A Hostage for Hinterland (April-July 1975 Galaxy as "Helium"; exp 1976), set the pattern for much of his work: in a Post-Holocaust USA, where floating Cities depend upon ...
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 ...