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Saturday 13 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Weybright and Talley
US publisher, which was founded in 1966 and sold circa 1973 to David McKay Publications, who dissolved the imprint. It is remembered for discovering John Boyd and publishing his first nine novels. / Victor Weybright and Truman Talley (1925-2013) served as publisher and editor respectively, as they had done at New American Library in the 1950s and the first half of the ...
Escher, M C
Working name of Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972). He had no real connections to either sf literature or sf Illustration during his career as an artist specializing in woodcuts and lithographs. However, he is renowned for regularly employing Mathematics to depict impossible scenes, effectively classifying him as an sf artist – and one of great significance, since his paradoxical works relate to bedrock ...
Leinster, Murray
Pseudonym – pronounced "Lenster" as in the Irish province of Leinster – under which US author William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1896-1975) was best known in the sf field, and under which he wrote almost all his work in the genre; the exceptions were a few novels as Jenkins [see below] and some stories in magazines, mainly those in the Bud Gregory series as by William Fitzgerald, plus a small number as by Will Jenkins or Will F Jenkins. One of the very few authors of American ...
Invaders from Mars
1. Film (1953). National Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Written by Richard Blake (and John Tucker Battle, uncredited). Cast includes Helena Carter, Leif Erickson, Arthur Franz and Jimmy Hunt. 78 minutes (82 minutes in Europe). Colour. / A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by the director of Things to Come (1936), made for children but capable of terrifying them. Through a little boy's ...
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 ...