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Sunday 7 December 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.
Site updated on 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Æon Speculative Fiction
US downloadable Online Magazine which began as a Semiprozine but paid professional word rates for its last two issues. It was published and edited by mother and daughter Bridget and Marti McKenna, initially through Scorpius Digital in Seattle, Washington and, from issue #7 by Quintamid, Seattle. It ran for 14 quarterly issues (missing only February 2007) from November 2004 to May 2008. The unpublished fifteenth issue and other ...
Jeffers, Alex
(1957- ) Working name of US author Donnan Call Jeffers, Jr, who published his first three stories under that name. He has also published sf under the name Adam Morrow. He is the grandson of American poet Robinson Jeffers, whose work appears as epigraph to his second collection, and whose austere unsentimentality can be glimpsed in some of his fiction. / Jeffers first began publishing sf with "Mask" in New Dimensions 6 (anth 1976) edited by Robert ...
Glaser, Milton
(1929-2020) US graphic designer and typeface designer who co-founded Push Pin Studios in 1954 and set up his own design company Milton Glaser Inc in 1974. His work includes more than 400 posters, New York's iconic logo I ♥ NY (1977) and the "bullet" logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005. Glaser's often deceptively simple but always striking book cover designs appeared on a number of titles of genre interest, including Clifton ...
Diffin, Charles W
(1884-1966) US engineer, airplane salesman and author who graduated with a degree in analytical chemistry from the University of Buffalo, New York. He was most active with the magazines published by William Clayton and Street & Smith. He was one of the better writers whom Harry Bates encouraged to write for the new Astounding Stories (see Astounding), though he rapidly descended into ...
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 ...