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Tuesday 9 June 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.
Site updated on 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Koch, Howard
(1901-1995) US playwright and screenwriter, blacklisted by Hollywood studios in 1951 for his left-wing political views; he is best known in sf circles for scripting the famous Orson Welles Radio adaptation of War of the Worlds (1938), which caused at least some US listeners to panic – though not, it would seem, to the extent conveyed in The ...
Hession, Rónán
(1975- ) Irish musician and author, who has performed from around 2003 in the former capacity as by Mumblin' Deaf Ro. His first novels, Leonard and Hungry Pat (2019) and Panenka (2021), are nonfantastic. His third, Ghost Mountain (2024), features the sudden irruption into the middle of a small town of a sizeable mountain, an event which seems also to have occurred elsewhere. The characters in the tale treat this inexplicable event ...
Gorer, Geoffrey
(1905-1985) UK anthropologist and author whose speculative studies in the cultural anthropology of the Western world – much influenced by his lifelong friend Margaret Mead (1901-1978) – were famous during his lifetime, and whose Nobody Talks Politics: A Satire With an Appendix on our Political Intelligentsia (1936) is a Satire on UK Politics of the 1930s as seen through the eyes of a young man woken from a ...
Magilumiere Co. Ltd.
Japanese animated tv series (2024; vt Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.; original title Kabushiki Gaisha Majirumie). Moe. J.C.Staff. Directed by Masahiro Hiraoka. Written by Shingo Nagai. Based on the Manga by Sekka Iwata and Yu Aoki. Voice cast includes Fairouz Ai, Akira Ishida, Yumiri Hanamori, Hiyori Kono, Rikiya Koyama and Daiki Yamashita. Twelve 24 minute episodes. Colour. / Being a Magical Girl is "a respectable ...
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 ...