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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. ...
After Blue
French film (2021); original title After blue (Paradis sale). Ecce Films / Ha Ma Productions. Written and directed by Bertrand Mandico. Cast includes Agata Buzek, Elina Lowensohn, Paula Luna and Vimala Pons. 129 minutes. Colour. / "To be incoherent means to have faith in cinema, it means to have a romantic approach, unformatted, free, disturbed and dreamlike, cinegenic, an epic narration." So reads part of the Incoherence Manifesto co-written by ...
Clagett, John
(1916-2013) US naval officer during World War Two, diplomat, teacher/professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and author whose first sf novel, A World Unknown (1975), is of some interest for its portrayal of an Alternate-History USA dominated by a Latin civilization that has never been influenced by Christianity – Jesus Christ having never existed. In The Orange R (1978), mutants known as ...
Watson, Tom
(1982- ) UK author whose first novel Metronome (2022) is set in a Near Future Dystopian UK where women have lost control of their bodies (see Sex; Women in SF); the protagonists, a young couple planning to conceive without permission, have been exiled to a northern Island. The focus on these years (see ...
Fawcett, E Douglas
(1866-1960) UK author and mystical thinker, long resident in Switzerland. His first (and best-known) Scientific Romance, Hartmann the Anarchist, or The Doom of the Great City (June-September 1893 The English Illustrated Magazine; 1893), illustrated by Fred T Jane, features a 1920 anarchist revolution against a wicked, capitalist UK, with London being destroyed by ...
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 ...