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Monday 15 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.
Site updated on 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Stables, Gordon
(1840-1910) Scottish medical doctor and author of children's fiction, writing well over a hundred novels, primarily for boys; he served as surgeon on a whaling boat and later with the Royal Navy until 1875; some of his books were signed Dr Gordon Stables, RN, and some others were signed W Gordon-Stables or W Gordon Stables, MD, RN. He wrote extensively for the Boys' Papers, including The Boy's Own Paper, where he published many ...
Crane, Elizabeth
Pseudonym of Dan S Trent (1946- ) and Lynda Trent (1942- ), US authors of a Time Travel historical romance, Reflections in Time (1992), which carries its troubled protagonist from contemporary times to 1880s Louisiana; most of their work is paranormal romance, and is not listed here. This "Crane" should not be confused with the New York-born Elizabeth Crane whose first book is ...
Saxton, Josephine
(1935-2023) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Wall" in Science Fantasy #78 for November 1965, and whose first three novels – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends [sic] (1970) and Group Feast (1971) – established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf Fabulations. ...
James, Rowland
(1885-? ) UK author of a Future War novel, While England Slept (1932), featuring the relatively benign Invasion of the UK with the aid of a rejuvenating gas which causes Amnesia but does not kill; as they cannot remember how Machines work, the population vacates Cities and settles in Pastoral ...
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 ...