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Wednesday 18 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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Ho-Yen, Polly
(? - ) UK author whose early novels have been designed for Young Adult readers, beginning with Boy in the Tower (2014), which is mostly set in a high-rise in a desolate Near Future Dystopian London menaced by a Disaster of unknown origin: giant mobile plants that devour buildings. ...
Bramah, Ernest
Working name of UK author Ernest Brammah Smith (1868-1942) for all his writing; he is best-known for two series, the Max Carrados sequence [see Checklist below] about a blind detective, all of whose Perceptions (except of course sight) are enormously enhanced by rigorous training; and a series of tales in which the Chinese Kai Lung displays his skills as a professional story-teller – often to stave off some unpleasant fate, like Scheherazade. ...
Swan, Christopher
(1946- ) US author whose Near Future tale of redemptive Ecology, YV88 (1977) with Chet Roaman, describes the transformation of the eponymous Yosemite Valley National Park by 1988 into an enclave no longer savaged by roads, rampant tourism, exploitation. A light railroad system replaces cars; the environmentally destructive O'Shaughnessy Dam. The vision was attractive, but as advocacy the book failed ...
Sengoku Jieitai
Film (1981; vt Time Slip). Toho. Directed by Kosei Saito. Written by Toshio Kaneda, based on Sengoku Jieitai ["Civil War Self-Defence Force"] (1974) by Ryō Hanmura. Cast includes Sonny Chiba, Iasao Natsuki, Jana Okada and Miyuki Ono. 139 minutes, cut to 100 minutes. Colour. / Based on one of Ryō Hanmura's intelligent novels, which use sf reinterpretations to comment on Japanese history, ...
Desart, The Earl of
Title of UK author William Ulick O'Connor Cuffe (1845-1898), styled Viscount Castlecuffe until he assumed the earldom at the age of 20 in 1865. He signed all his books "The Earl of Desart"; several of the stories assembled as Love and Pride on an Iceberg and Other Stories (coll 1887) are sf, at least two of them anticipating with comic apprehension a Near Future in which women are emancipated (his widow became the first woman Senator in the Irish ...
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 ...