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Friday 13 February 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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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
MacAulay, David
(1946- ) UK-born artist and author, in the US from 1958; much of his work, beginning with Cathedral: The Story of its Construction (1973), has concentrated on architectural subjects, a focus reflected in Unbuilding (graph 1980), which depicts in pictures and text the hypothetical demolition of the Empire State Building (see New York), and in The Way Things Work (graph 1988), where nonfantastic machines ...
Sternbach, Rick
Working name of American artist Richard Michael Sternbach (1951- ), born in Connecticut. He left the University of Connecticut after three years to begin working as an artist and garnered his first sf assignment in 1973, for the October 1973 issue of Analog, illustrating G Harry Stine's article "A Program for Space Flight" with interior art and a cover depicting two spherical spacecraft near an enormous planet. ...
Metaphysics
One of the qualities of sf that sometimes baffles new readers is the relative infrequency, despite its label, with which it deals with the hard sciences; indeed, sf deals as often with metaphysics as with Physics. This is not an accidental or a recent development; the exploration of metaphysical questions has been central to sf at least since the time of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus ...
Bornefeld, William
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, Time and Light (1996) depicts a Dystopian post-holocaust society in which all visual arts are forbidden, and the population is required to ingest daily a pharmacopoeia of Drugs which combine the effects of Viagra and Prozac and more; the protagonist discovers a horde of forbidden photographs from the twentieth century, which stirs his mind and leads to ...
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 ...