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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. ...
Popular Science Fiction
Australian thin (64pp) Digest-size saddle-stapled magazine. Six issues, undated but July 1953 to March 1955, published by Frew Publications, Sydney; editor not named, but Ronald Forster. It published primarily reprints from US pulps but included some new Australian material by Norma K Hemming and, surprisingly, by US authors, particularly in the final issue which was almost all new material, by Sam ...
Bovell, Andrew
(1962- ) Australian playwright, also active as a screenwriter, his credits in the latter capacity including a screenplay for the 2010 film version of Edge of Darkness (1985), a UK television tale in six parts in which the government has colluded with a multinational corporation to construct a highly-toxic nuclear power plant almost certain to instigate toxic pollution. Of his numerous plays, When the Rain Stops Falling ...
Olemy, P T
Pseudonym (ie Ptolemy) of US author George Baker (? - ) of two spoofish thrillers, Pink Dolphin (1967) and The Transgressors (1967). In his sf novel, The Clones (1968), Clones, because of their powers of Communication, may be able to save Earth from Invasion by Aliens; or in fact help Earth ...
Technocracy
Technocracy as it commonly understood is a government controlled solely by qualified experts, especially Scientists – a system that one might imagine would be popular in the sf community. Yet the literature of sf offers both positive and negative visions of the benefits and drawbacks of such a government (see Politics). There is similar diversity in sf's treatments of a related idea, Eugenics, which ...
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 ...