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Sunday 11 October 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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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Melchior, Ib
(1917-2015) Danish-born actor, screenwriter and director, in the USA since World War Two, whose short story "The Racer" (October 1956 Escapade) – about car-racing as a gorily extreme spectator sport (see Games and Sports) – was adapted for Cinema as the cult classic Death Race 2000 (1975). This was in turn remade as Death Race (2008). Melchior scripted or ...
Itō Norio
(1942- ) Japanese translator, anthologist and critic, who first found fame aged nineteen with a review in Uchūjin of the magazine serialization of the sf novel Utsukushii Hoshi ["Beautiful Star"] (October 1962 Shinchō; 1967) that provoked the public ire of its author, Yukio Mishima. Itō then dropped out of his French Literature degree at Waseda University and contributed to ...
Hamilton, Virginia
(1936-2002) US author, mostly of juveniles, and of very considerable interest in that field for the exploratory intensity of her work, from Zeely (1967) on, and for the depth of her presentation of the complex experience of being Black in the USA (her maternal grandfather was an escaped slave). Several of her better-known tales, like M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982), are fantasies. Of particular sf interest is the ...
McEwan, Ian
(1948- ) UK author who began writing material of interest to the fields of the fantastic with "Solid Geometry" in The New Review for July 1974 (also February 1975 Fantastic), in which the protagonist's fascination with the "impossible" geometry (see Dimensions; Mathematics) suggested in the title drags his wife (post-coitally) into an almost literal ...
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 ...