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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.
Site updated on 11 December 2025
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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 ...
Gotlieb, Phyllis
(1926-2009) Canadian author who may be best known for her Poetry, some of which – such as the long performable poems assembled in Doctor Umlaut's Earthly Kingdom (coll 1974) – is strongly fantastic. She took an MA with the University of Toronto in English language and literature, and married a professor of computer science, whom she credited for assistance on her second sf novel. She began publishing sf with "A Grain of Manhood" in ...
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
US film (1988). Chiodo Bros. Directed by Stephen Chiodo. Written by Charles Chiodo and Stephen Chiodo. Cast includes Grant Cramer, Peter Licassi, John Allen Nelson, Michael S Siegel, Suzanne Snyder and John Vernon. 88 minutes. Colour. / Canoodling teenagers Mike Tobacco (Cramer) and Debbie Stone (Snyder) see a light fall from the sky; investigating, they find a circus tent (actually a Spaceship) in the middle of the forest. Entering, the pair observe ...
Kensett, Percy F
(1868-1940) UK author of The Amulet of Tarv: A Romance of the South Downs, 1,000 BC (1925), a Prehistoric SF tale whose present-day protagonists are given access via Time Viewer to the era in question; they are then able to establish Communications with the past. [JC]
Cross, Gillian
(1945- ) UK author, primarily for children, in various genres, including the Demon Headmaster sequence of horror tales [see Checklist below]. Of sf interest are Born of the Sun (1983), in which the search for an Incan Lost World intersects with family romance; New World (1992), in which adventures within a Virtual Reality world turn nightmarish; ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...