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Saturday 13 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.
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Varley, John
(1947-2025) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Picnic on Nearside" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for August 1974, and who was soon thought to be the most significant new sf writer of the late 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning (see Clones) and Identity Transfer, many of ...
Jones, Holly Goddard
(1979- ) US author, much of whose earlier work, which is nonfantastic, consists of intense studies of life in her native Kentucky, with some emphasis on its occasionally violent noir underside. She is of sf interest for her second novel, The Salt Line (2017), set in a Near Future America distorted into a Dystopian tyranny through the effects of a continent-wide assault of ticks. That this is not ...
Frank, Pat
Pseudonym of US journalist and author Harry Hart Frank (1907-1964) who served as a government official during World War Two, later serving with the UN. Though his three sf novels are well known within the field, Frank was not generally identified as an sf author. His first novel, Mr Adam (1946), exploits the fears of contamination felt in the USA after Hiroshima. All men but one are sterilized by a nuclear Disaster; the experiences of the sole fertile ...
Chillers
US letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine. Publisher: Charlton Comics. Editor: Roger Elwood. Three bimonthly issues, July to November 1981. / A final attempt by Charlton at a Monster Movies magazine, this title covered such films of the period as Clash of the Titans (1981), Escape from New York ...
Rorvik, David
(1944- ) US journalist who took his degree in journalism at the University of Montana and specialized in scientific and medical issues. His pseudo-nonfiction book In His Image: The Cloning of a Man (1978) claimed that the author had been involved in the 1973 creation of a Clone of a specific human being described as a wealthy businessman called Max. This caused both sensation and controversy, and led to a lawsuit filed against the ...
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 ...