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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 ...
Conrad, Joseph
(1857-1924) Polish-born author, in the UK mercantile marine from 1878 to 1894, a UK citizen from 1886, changing his name at that point from Józef Teodor Konrad Naleçz Korzeniowski to Joseph Conrad. For much of his life he laboured under the misprision of his early reputation as a teller of "mere" sea tales; but in later life he gained commercial success, and increasingly after World War Two he received wide attention for the more complex works of his maturity, like Nostromo ...
Quatermass Xperiment, The
Film (1955; vt The Creeping Unknown US). Hammer. Directed by Val Guest. Written by Richard Landau, Val Guest, based on the BBC TV serial by Nigel Kneale. Cast includes Brian Donlevy (Quatermass), Jack Warner and Richard Wordsworth. 82 minutes, cut to 78 minutes. Black and white. / It was this film version of the BBC's television serial The Quatermass Experiment that convinced the Hammer ...
Mullen, R D
(1915-1998) US sf critic and scholar, now emeritus professor of English at Indiana State University. Mullen was a founding member of the Science Fiction Research Association. In 1973 he established Science Fiction Studies and was its publisher and, with Darko Suvin, its co-editor through 1978; he returned to the journal as an editor in 1991 and managing editor ...
Lafferty, R A
(1914-2002) US author who worked in the electrical business until retiring to write full-time in 1970; he came to writing only in his forties, publishing his first sf, "Day of the Glacier", in The Science Fiction Stories for January 1960. Over the next twenty-five years (he reportedly retired from writing at the age of about seventy) he produced very many stories – about 200 have been published – and a number of novels. The ...
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 ...