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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.
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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 ...
Willeford, Charles
(1919-1988) US soldier – much decorated in World War Two – and author, best known for noir crime thrillers like The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971) and for the equally dark police thrillers in the Miami-based Hoke Moseley series, most famously the first title in the sequence, Miami Blues (1984). In a prefiguration of the surreal juxtapositions examined in his work, Willeford's first novel, High Priest of California (1953), was bound with a ...
Bounds, Sydney J
(1920-2006) UK author, active in various fields from the late 1940s, who published his first Horror fantasy, "Strange Portrait", in the sole issue of Outlands dated Winter 1946. Some early short Space Opera in Authentic and New Worlds appeared 1953-1955 as by George C Duncan. He built a considerable and well-respected ...
Herbert, James
(1943-2013) UK advertising art director and author, best known for bestselling tales of horror, several of which have an sf premise (see Horror in SF). His first and still best known novel, The Rats (1974), which begins the Rats sequence, is a Disaster novel in which London is overwhelmed by a vicious strain of giant Mutant Rats. ...
Brautigan, Richard
(1935-1984) US author and poet, known primarily for his work outside the sf field. Most of his whimsically surreal fiction – like A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) or Trout Fishing in America (1967) – lies on the borderline of Fantasy, but does not pass over. In Watermelon Sugar (1968), set in an indeterminate hippie-pastoral setting, echoes the Post-Holocaust novels of ...
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 ...