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Sunday 12 July 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.
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Bolmer, W B
(1845-1897) US minister and author of The Time Is Coming (1896), a Near Future tale in which a Jewish state is founded in Palestine; Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State (1896) had just been published. The Turkish empire, to which Palestine had belonged, initially resists partition, but is soon brought to order by America with the aid of advanced Weapons, which destroy parts of ...
Gray, Curme
(1910-1980) US author in whose complex sf novel Murder in Millennium VI (1951) a homicide case shakes a matriarchal Dystopia thousands of years hence into the near Far Future – murder being inexplicable to the inhabitants of this world. The focus of interest in the novel is the gradual unveiling of the fact that a slow transition – not back to patriarchy but to some synthesis – is under way. There is a ...
Pausacker, Jenny
(1948- ) Australian author of books for the Young Adult market, mostly not sf, though Fast Forward (1989), for younger readers, is an sf tale. The Rings (1997) is horror, and The Perfect Princess (2003), in the Quentaris Chronicles Shared World enterprise, is fantasy. [JC]
Children of the Damned
Film (1963; vt Horror!). MGM. Directed by Anton M Leader. Written by Jack Briley, based on The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; rev 1958; vt Village of the Damned 1960) by John Wyndham. Cast includes Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris, Ian Hendry and Bessie Love. 90 minutes. Black and white. / This UK film is not a sequel to the successful Village of the Damned (1960); it is a ...
Duckworth, Marilyn
(1935- ) New Zealand author and poet, in UK with her family from 1939 to 1947, whose novel A Gap in the Spectrum (1959) is a tale of disorientation and perhaps Amnesia or false memory. The nineteen-year-old female protagonist awakes in London with a sense that the City and the world are unfamiliar; that she hails from another country called ...
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 ...