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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 ...
Sheckley, Robert
(1928-2005) US author, born and educated in New York, where he set some of his fiction, publishing his first story, "Final Examination", in Imagination for May 1952. Sheckley's career falls into three periods: the 1950s, the 1960s, and afterwards. In the first period he produced short fiction prolifically for several years in various magazines, though his supple, witty, talkative, well crafted work was especially suited to ...
Alexander, Karl
(1944-2015) US film set worker – as cameraman, electrician, gaffer, grip etc – and author whose first novel was Time After Time (1979), a Time Travel romp in which Jack the Ripper evades pursuit in 1893 by stealing the Time Machine described and here constructed by H G Wells, travelling through time to 1979 San Francisco (see ...
Wonder
US letter-size saddle-stapled Media Magazine printed on newsprint. Publishers: Rod Bennett and Lint Hatcher as Wonder Studios. Editor: Rod Bennett. 13 issues, 1987 to 1997. Publication schedule, though nominally quarterly, was highly irregular. / Unusually for a magazine largely devoted to Monster Movies, Wonder began as a quasi-religious philosophical publication with a definite sf slant that described itself ...
Foster, Alex
(? - ) US editor and author who is of sf interest for his first novel, Circular Motion (2025), a Fabulation set in at least initially in a Near Future London, though a device from the SF Megatext – a near-orbit rapid Transportation system – duly scatters the cast. The sf ...
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 ...