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Thursday 19 February 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 18 February 2026
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Bradley, Marion Zimmer
(1930-1999) US author, initially of adventure sf with an emphasis on swashbuckling routines, often verging on Sword and Sorcery, though always with a recognizably sf rationale; and of other fairly unremarkable work, some of it (not usually fantastic) under names like Lee Chapman, John Dexter, Miriam Gardner, Valerie Graves and Morgan Ives. She began publishing short stories professionally in 1953 with "Women Only" and "Keyhole", both for ...
Wilkins, Vaughan
(1890-1959) UK journalist and author, in active service during World War One, best known for historical romances like And So – Victoria (1937; rev 1956), but who wrote some tales of sf interest. Being Met Together (1944; vt Napoleon's Submarine 1972), though marginal, interestingly describes an attempt to rescue Napoleon from St Helena using a submarine (see Under the Sea) ...
Cowley, Stewart
(1947- ) UK author who has also written as by Steven Caldwell and The Reverend Hubert Venables, most but not all of his work being spoof compilations. The first of these, the Terran Trade Authority Handbook beginning with the heavily illustrated Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD (coll 1978), comprises a series of "nonfiction" guides to the Space Opera-inflected Near Future, extending into more ...
Shepherd, Peng
(1986- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Free Cake" in Weird Lies: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Strange Stories from Liars' League (anth 2013) edited by Katy Darby and Cherry Potts; her first novel, The Book of M (2018), a fabulist tale Equipoisal between sf and fantasy, depicts a Near Future world where humans intermittently lose their shadows, and with ...
Jones, Mervyn
(1922-2010) UK journalist and author, son of Ernest Jones (1879-1958), Sigmund Freud's biographer; now best known for his many novels (twenty-nine were published) from 1952, though he gained early fame with his political writings in journals like Tribune and the New Statesman. On the Last Day (1958) is a Near-Future story about a Russian/Chinese Invasion of Britain, during a non-nuclear ...
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 ...