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Friday 11 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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Bierbower, Austin
(circa 1844-1913) US academic and author whose Prehistoric SF tale, From Monkey to Man, or Society in the Tertiary Age: A Story of the Missing Link [for full title see Checklist] (1894), suggests the Ice Age (see Climate Change) as the effective cause of the Missing Link's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which is located in the heart of what would become the United States; and that proto-men's ...
Yates, Dornford
Pseudonym of UK lawyer and author Cecil William Mercer (1885-1960), Saki's first cousin; in active service during World War One, 1914-1917, and in World War Two; in France and Africa from the early 1920s. Some short stories in his well-known and once very popular Berry sequence of English social comedies contain fantasy elements, including dowsing (see ESP), ...
Boulle, Pierre
(1912-1994) French author who trained as an electrical engineer and spent eight years in Malaysia as a planter and soldier. His experience of the Orient permeated much of his early work, which was generally not sf; Le pont sur la rivière Kwaï (1952; trans Xan Fielding as The Bridge on the River Kwai 1954) remains his best-known novel. Boulle uses moral fable to pinpoint human absurdities, and his relatively large body of work in the sf genre is a good ...
Clark, William
(1916-1985) UK journalist for newspapers – diplomatic correspondent for the Observer 1950-1955 – and television; served as press secretary for Sir Anthony Eden, but resigned in protest at the invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis in 1956. His first novel of sf interest, Number 10 (1966), puts into a Near Future frame some of his feelings, but no details of the scandal; his second, Special Relationship (1968), pits ...
Shirow Masamune
Pen-name and preferred romanization of Masanori Oda (1961- ), a publicity-shy Japanese comics artist crucial to the dissemination of Manga into the international market. Beginning with Areopagus Arther (1980 Atlas), Shirow was published in the fanzine Atlas, home to his early work until he was reprinted by professional publishers. Shirow's meteoric rise in the 1980s found him catching the zeitgeist ...
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 ...