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Friday 10 April 2026
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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Beaumont, Roger
(1935- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Trade-Off" as R A Beaumont in Analog for February 1973. His one sf novel, published by Robert Hale Limited, is Deep Space Processional (1982) with R Snowden Ficks, a Space Opera featuring Aliens and court intrigue in a ...
Ollivant, Alfred
(1874-1927) UK author who had been a soldier; a riding accident left him crippled (badly for ten years), and – long before the outbreak of World War One – he turned to writing. He remains best-known for his first book, Owd Bob (1898; vt Bob, Son of Battle 1898), about a wise and subtle sheepdog; he is of sf interest for his last book, To-morrow: A Romance of the Future (1927), in which twenty-fourth century ...
Barzak, Christopher
(1975- ) US author and teacher of creative writing who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Mad Tea Party" in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet for Winter 1999; the story is collected in his Before and Afterlives (coll 2013), which won a Shirley Jackson Award as best collection. He has written Horror tales as part of the "Ratbastards" ...
Watts, Peter
(1958- ) Canadian marine biologist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Niche" in Tesseracts3 (anth 1990) edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott; his early short fiction was assembled as Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (coll 2001); Beyond the Rift (coll 2013) mostly assembles more recent stories. He is very much better known, however, for his longer work, in ...
Klaabu kosmoses
Estonian/Russian animated film (1981; vt Klaabu in Space). Tallinnfilm. Directed by Avo Paistik. Written by Avo Paistik and Enn Vetemaa. 15 minutes. Colour. / Klaabu kosmoses is the third part of a trilogy of dialogue-free shorts by Paistik. The first is Klaabu (1978; 10 minutes), where an egg is formed from a drop of water and is brooded by a passing bird: it hatches into Klaabu, a four-limbed egg with a face (and, judging from ...
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 ...