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Tuesday 17 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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
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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. ...
Isabella, Tony
(1951- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "If Wishes Were Horses" with Bob Ingersoll for The Ultimate Super-Villains (anth 1996) edited by Stan Lee, and who has since published a Captain America Tie, Captain America: Liberty's Torch (1998) with Bob Ingersoll and a ...
Pogue, Bill
(1930-2014) US Skylab astronaut and author, whose The Trikon Deception (1992) with Ben Bova, a Near Future tale set on a vast orbiting satellite where scientists employed by various private corporations are ostensibly united in an attempt to work out a technological fix to save the planet, which is decaying rapidly through Ecological degradation; but conflicts soon ensue. [JC]
Ascher, Maurice
(1873-1965) German author, much of his nonfiction being studies in Judaism and Jewish issues. He is of sf interest for Gulliver's Neue Reise ["Gulliver's New Journey"] (1915), a Fantastic Voyage tale based on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735), Gulliver in this case being an aviator who makes a crash-landing on an unknown ...
Butor, Michel
(1926-2016) French critic and author, principally known as a leading exponent of the nouveau roman. Butor was one of the first mainstream and academic critics to consider sf seriously according to the same standards as general literature. He published an invigorating analysis of Jules Verne as early as 1949, and examined the dilemmas and future potential of the field in his penetrating study, "La crise de croissance de la SF" (1953); this was first ...
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 ...