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Friday 15 May 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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Suzuki Kōji
(1957-2026) Japanese author and essayist, largely known in English through the Cinema adaptations of several of his books, the international success of which obscured his wide-ranging domestic output. His horror and Equipoisal fiction proceeded in tandem with a wide array (not listed here) of books on young fatherhood and occasional works on motorcycle travel. He was also the translator of Simon Brett's ...
Brewer, Gene
(1937- ) US author of the K-PAX sequence featuring a protagonist calling himself "prot" (lower case, rhyming with "boat") who claims to his psychiatrist "Gene Brewer" in the ward where he has been detained that he is a visiting Alien, 337 years old, from the planet K-PAX. Throughout the initial trilogy – which comprises K-PAX (1995), On a Beam of Light (2001; vt K-PAX II: On a Beam of Light ...
Red Dawn
Film (1984). MGM/United Artists. Directed by John Milius. Written by Kevin Reynolds, Milius. Cast includes C Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze and Lea Thompson. 114 minutes. Colour. / Russians nuke US cities and their paratroops, with Cuban and Nicaraguan allies, invade the Midwest. Highschool kids escape into the Colorado mountains, become guerrillas, undergo rites of passage and male bonding, fight brilliantly, mostly die. This incoherent and implausible film gets so ...
Lunatic, Sir Humphry
Pseudonym used by Irish actor, critic, playwright and author Francis Gentleman (1728-1784), whose working years were spent mostly in England, for a Proto SF imitation – and perhaps conscious Parody of – the Fantastic Voyage as found in the work of Cyrano de Bergerac and others; the tale, ...
Gavin, Jamila
(1941- ) Indian-born children's author in UK from the early 1950s, prolific in several genres since she began publishing in 1979. Of sf interest are Ali and the Robots (1986), a not particularly challenging tale involving Robots, and the more ambitious The Wormholers (1996), an Alternate Cosmos tale. [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 ...