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Friday 12 December 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.
Site updated on 11 December 2025
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
George, Brian
(? - ) UK author in whose sf novel, Atom of Doubt (1959), a fake hormonal treatment which ostensibly makes women irresistible to men turns out to be real, and causes some chaos; there are elements of Satire in the tale. [JC]
Cook, Kenneth
(1929-1987) Australian author of Play Little Victims (1978 chap), a Satire depicting a world inherited by rational Mice after 2000, who attempt to control mouse Overpopulation by literally applying texts left by an extinct humanity, on the apprehension that all human activities – including War, famine, genocide and the automobile – were introduced in order to ...
Ukraine
Any account of Ukrainian Fantastika must distinguish between works written in Ukraine and works written in Ukrainian, a Venn diagram of contending linguistic and political forces. These include a sub-genre of "emigre" fiction, written in Germany, France, Canada and the United States up until the 1960s, works written in what is now the geographic territory of Ukraine, ...
Lift, De
Film (1983; vt The Lift). Sigma Films. Directed by Dick Maas. Written by Mass; music by Maas. Cast includes Huub Stapel and Willeke Van Ammelrooy. 99 minutes. Colour. / This neat Dutch Horror film with an sf rationale, dubbed atrociously into English, tells of a homicidal lift (elevator) in a high-rise office building. The lift is controlled by an organic, living Computer (biochip), manufactured in Japan, 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 ...