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Tuesday 17 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.
Site updated on 16 February 2026
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Wiltshire, David
(1935- ) UK author of several novels for Robert Hale Limited including three Genre SF tales under his own name, beginning with The Homosaur (1978), and one as by John Bedford, The Titron Madness (1984). A BBC Television serial adaptation of his Horror in SF tale Child of Vodyanoi (1978; vt ...
Drew, Wayland
(1932-1998) Canadian teacher and author, often on environment issues as they affect Canada and its indigenous peoples, who began publishing sf with The Wabeno Feast (1973), a complex tale about Holocaust and its roots, in which three narrative strands all tangibly cohere – the eighteenth-century journal of an early entrepreneur who confronts the heart of darkness in the pale wabeno (an Indian shaman), the canoe trip of a Canadian couple through ...
Polidori, John
(1795-1821) UK medical doctor who became the personal physician of Lord Byron (see Icons) in 1816; as an author his work is of more interest to the fantastic in general [for fuller entry on Polidori see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] than for its relevance to anything like sf. He is relevant initially for his participation – along with Bryon, Mary ...
Xenogears
Videogame (1998). Square. Designed by Tetsuya Takahashi. Platforms: PS1. / Xenogears is a Console Role Playing Game (see Computer Role Playing Games) which is played in a three-dimensional perspective. It is more adult in tone than earlier Japanese CRPGs such as Chrono Trigger (1995), with a player character ...
Sputnik
Russian film (2020). Sony Pictures presents an Art Pictures Studio, Hype Film and Vodorod Pictures production in association with Fond kino. Directed by Egor Abramenko. Written by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev. Cast includes Oksana Akinshina, Fyodor Bondarchuk, Pyotr Fyodorov and Anton Vasiliev. 113 minutes. Colour. / A cosmonaut returns from orbit in 1983 with an Alien lifeform inside him (see ...
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 ...