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Tuesday 10 March 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 9 March 2026
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Smibert, Angie
(1963- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Boy Who Spoke in Colors" in Odyssey Magazine for December 2007. Her Near Future Young Adult Dystopian Memento Mora sequence, beginning with Memento Mora (short version May/June 2008 Odyssey Magazine; 2011), is set in a world where ...
Vanishing Shadow, The
US Serial Film (1934). Universal Pictures. Directed by Lew Landers (as Louis Friedlander). Written by Basil Dickey, Het Mannheim, George Morgan and Ella O'Neill. Cast includes Richard Cramer, James Durkin, Ada Ince, Walter Miller, Onslow Stevens. Twelve 20-minute episodes. Black and white. / Stanley Stanfield (Stevens) visits Professor Carl Van Dorn (Durkin), the world's greatest authority on electrical energy and a friend of his late father, who had ...
McLaren, Colin Andrew
(1940- ) UK archival librarian, playwright and author, in Scotland from 1969. Most of his novels are Young Adult historical tales; of sf interest is Rattus Rex (1978), set in an 1860s London plagued by a sudden infestation of strangely well-disciplined Rats (for As Above So Below and Urban Fantasy see The ...
Jarre, Jean Michel
(1948- ) French composer and performer of electronic synthesizer pieces. There is no explicit sf content to the instrumental suites Oxygene (1976), Equinoxe (1978) and Les Chants Magnétiques (1981) but it is hard to escape the sense that these bleepy, throbbing, soaring soundscapes are aural SF. Jarre is certainly fascinated by space. The last track of Rendez-Vous (1986), "La Derniere Rendez-Vous" is dedicated ...
Berry, Rick
Working name of American artist Richard Berry (1953- ), born Richard Riley, though Berry is now his legal name; he is sometimes credited as Richard or Rich, and he also uses the pseudonym Sam Rakeland. Berry tells biographers that he left home at the age of seventeen to work for underground comics, but there seems to be no information linking his name to specific titles. The self-trained Berry then developed an interest in the emerging field of digital art and eventually ...
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 ...