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Friday 20 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Bleiler, Richard
(1959- ) US professional librarian and bibliographer, son of E F Bleiler, with whom he has collaborated on several works; his two solo works – The Index to Adventure Magazine (1990 2vols) and The Annotated Index to The Thrill Book: Complete Indexes to and Descriptions of Everything Published in Street and Smith's The Thrill Book (1991) – are invaluable explorations into rich sources of pulp ...
Shand, Daniel
(1989- ) Scottish teacher and author in whose first novel, Fallow (2016), two brothers embark on a hegira through Scotland, with a picaresque shaping to the tale that evokes the supernatural. He is of sf interest for his third novel, Model Citizens (2022), set in a Near Future world where the growing stresses facing Homo sapiens are, perhaps, solved by the issuing/creating of ...
Jones, K C
(? - ) US screenwriter and author whose first novel, Black Tide (2022), treats Near Future First Contact in terms of Horror in SF, as seen via two protagonists who, after a one-night stand, must face an apocalyptic new world, with strong hints of the end of civilization as Homo sapiens has claimed to know it (see ...
Williams, Paul O
(1935-2009) US poet – specializing in the haiku – professor of literature and author who won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1983, and who was known in the sf field almost exclusively for his Pelbar Cycle – comprising The Breaking of Northwall (1981), The Ends of the Circle (1981), The Dome in the Forest (1981), The Fall of the Shell (1982), ...
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 ...