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Monday 14 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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Stintzi, John Elizabeth
Canadian poet and author whose first novel Vanishing Monuments (2020) evokes images out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize the growing dementia of its protagonist's mother. They are of sf interest (see in particular Absurdist SF) for their second novel, My Volcano (2022), which multiply Equipoises topoi out of various genres to depict a kind of ...
Butler, William Francis
(1838-1910) Irish soldier and author whose military involvement in the Riel Rebellion in western Canada resulted in his recommending the creation of what would eventually become the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was in active service, with the rank of colonel, when he published anonymously a Battle of Dorking tale, The Invasion of England: Told Twenty Years After (1882) as By an Old Soldier, in which Germany mounts an ...
Dillon, Diane and Leo
Leo Dillon (1933-2012) and Diane Dillon (1933- ), US illustrators, active together from around 1953, married in 1957; the only team ever to win either the Hugo or the Locus Award for Best Professional Artist, both of which they received in 1971. They began freelancing in 1958, at first working separately. Together their work covers many fields: record album covers, advertising art, Christmas cards, children's ...
Robinson, Phil
(1847-1902) UK journalist and author of stories and essays mostly set in a romanticized India or Africa (see Imperialism); his collections, usually interspersing fiction and nonfiction, include some sf. Of strongest interest may be "The Hunting of the Soko" (in Under the Punkah, coll 1881), an Apes as Human tale that may have influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs's creation of ...
True, John Preston
(1859-1933) US author, mostly of historical novels; the eponymous meteor fragment, in The Iron Star and What It Saw On Its Journey through the Ages: From Myth to History (1899), which is written for older children, inspires or is in the vicinity of significant moments in the gradual Evolution of Homo sapiens, a voyage initially depicted in Prehistoric SF terms, later more mundanely. [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 ...