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Monday 13 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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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McQuinn, Donald E
(1930- ) US soldier and author whose first sf novel (his fifth overall), Warrior (1990), packs into its setting – a Ruined Earth America 500 years after the nation's nuclear destruction – almost every Cliché available to writers of barbarian-warrior novels: a variety of agon-based tribal societies; a woman-run church; a batch of twenty-first-century warriors freshly resurrected ...
Mitchell, David
(1969- ) UK author, in Japan 1994-2000, whose work exhibits a thrusting and muscular (but finely tempered) Equipoise among the genres of Fantastika. His first novel, Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts (1999), which it would be reductionist to describe as a collection of linked stories, is all the same presented as a set of stories, each of which inhabits a ...
Sullivan, Philip A
(1882-? ) US lawyer and author of a Utopia, Man Finds the Way (1939), in which the power of Religion, through the founding of the United States of the World, leads to universal peace. [JC]
Osondu, E C
(? - ) Nigerian author, in US from around 2005, most of his work being short fiction, and mostly nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for Alien Stories (coll 2021), where tales of Aliens, sometimes engaged in First Contact, resonate with the issues of colonialism and racism (see Afrofuturism, Imperialism; ...
O'Neill, Gerard K
(1927-1992) US physicist, at Princeton University from 1954 until his death, whose popular-science book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977) argues strongly for the construction of Space Habitats, either in Earth orbit or at one of the stable Lagrange Points of our Earth/Moon system – especially L5. His arguments aroused great interest among would-be space colonists, and were influential in ...
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 ...