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Tuesday 14 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.
Site updated on 13 January 2025
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Pace, Sue
(? - ) US author of The Last Oasis (1993), a Young Adult tale set in a Near Future world that has suffered calamitous Climate Change after long decades of environmental destruction; the young protagonists flee their precarious Keep – a shopping mall in Portland, Oregon – in the direction of Idaho, where the ...
Simpson, D G B
(? - ) UK author of Anti-Gas (circa 1940-1945 chap), a World War Two tale in which Poison gas is defeated through pluck and a timely Invention. [JC]
Grouling, Thomas Edward
(1940- ) US author and academic whose sf novel, Project 12 (1962), deals with a realistically described though ultimately abortive attempt to launch a Spaceship. [JC/DRL]
Great Year
The Great Year or Long Year, whose seasons last for many normal Earthly years, generations or even lifetimes, features in a number of sf works as a kind of literalization of cyclic history theories (see History in SF) in the context of Planetary Romance. The Dark Ages are reified as an interminable-seeming winter and the Golden Years as an equally prolonged summer. Special astronomical circumstances are generally invoked ...
Clark, Karen
(1960- ) UK author whose The Synthetics (1988 chap) portrays a Dystopian Britain through the lens of its school system. [JC]
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 ...