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Wednesday 9 July 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.
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Barnard, Keith
(? - ) UK author whose two sf novels combine horror tropes and Medicine; the particular focus in Embryo (1990) is made clear by its title, while The Betz Cell (1991) applies Near Future medical science to communicating with the dead. [JC]
Engling, Richard
(1952- ) US playwright, actor and author whose Near-Future sf novel, Body Mortgage (1989), tells in a Cyberpunk idiom the tale of a Chicago private eye on the track of a body-parts scam – in this world, one's own body can serve as collateral for a mortgage – in the immediate run-up to the millennium. Engling's obvious competence would show more clearly, perhaps, in a more fully ...
Williams, Charles
(1886-1945) UK poet, lay theologian and author whose novels are essentially theological Fantasy thrillers; in service but through bad health not in combat during World War One. He was closely associated with C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien as part of the Oxford reading group known as the Inklings. His romantic and obscurely devout use of ...
Friend, Oscar J
(1897-1963) US literary agent, editor and author who worked for the Standard Magazine chain on Captain Future, Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories during 1941-1944, a period when these magazines were most specifically aimed at adolescents. The editorial director at the time was Leo Margulies, with whom Friend later edited three anthologies (see below). ...
Green, A Lincoln
Pseudonym of the UK author eventually identified in David Finkelstein's Index to Blackwood's Magazine, 1901-1980 (1995) as the physician, paediatrician and evolutionist Louis Robinson (1857-1928). His literary activity as A Lincoln Green seems to have been restricted to one year, beginning with "The Captivity of the Professor" (February 1901 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine), in which an entomologist is captured by a species of evolved ants (see ...
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 ...