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Thursday 19 June 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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Johnson, Harold R
(1957-2022) Canadian lawyer and author, member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation, active from around 2000; some of his several novels are of sf interest. In The Cast Stone (2011), a retired academic is forced in the Near Future to confront the effects of the recent American Invasion of Canada, and the imposition of a military regime upon Canadians; his experiences as a First Nations Canadian are now reflected in wider ...
Haines, Donal Hamilton
(1886-1951) US author, in his later career usually about American football; his two connected sf novels for Young Adult readers, The Last Invasion (1914) and Clearing the Seas; Or, the Last of the Warships (1915), describe various aspects of a moderately futile Future War in which the United States is invaded by the "Blues" (whom E F Bleiler thinks must be Germans), ...
"X" [2]
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Setting Sun: An Ante-Dated Picture for a People (1904), a spoof Future War tale in which Britain defeats East Midasland; the Satire is no more taxing than that found in P G Wodehouse's better-known The Swoop (1909). [JC]
Levy, Joseph Hiam
(1838-1913) UK economist, journalist and author, active from before 1870, in politics a radical individualist whose later arguments prefigure American thought many years later (see Libertarian SF), and which led him to oppose vaccination and other social measures (in this, too, he prefigured later positions). An Individualist's Utopia (1912) presents in lightly fictionalized terms a Utopia drawn up on these lines, ...
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 ...