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Wednesday 17 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 15 June 2026
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Yolen, Jane
(1939-2026) US author, partially resident in Scotland, who began publishing poems and articles when still in college, and who first came to notice with books for children, the first of many being Pirates in Petticoats (1963). Of her circa 460 titles, many of which won awards in her field, most were for children (see listing below for some of these), many of them being picture books for younger children; most of her adult fiction, of which she wrote relatively little, was ...
Barr, Robert
(1849-1912) Scottish-born editor and author, in Canada 1854-1876, then in the US (working as a journalist) till 1881, afterwards mostly in England; some of his lighter fiction appeared as by Luke Sharp. He co-founded The Idler with William Dunkerley (better known as John Oxenham), co-editing it with Jerome K Jerome from February 1892 to July 1895, editing it solo August 1895 to November 1898; for further details see the ...
Saturn [magazine]
US Digest-size magazine. Published by Robert C Sproul as Candar Publishing Company. Edited by Sproul with editorial consultant Donald A Wollheim, who actually selected the stories and assembled the issues. Five issues March 1957 to March 1958 (but see below for later incarnations). / Considering some of the contributors, there was surprisingly little of interest in the magazine: Harlan ...
MC5
Detroit-based rock five-piece (the name is short for "Motor City 5"). Their raucous, energetic guitar-based sound anticipated, and directly influenced, the later emergence of punk rock, and is often read solely in those terms; but in fact their terms of cultural reference are all 1960s counterculture, anti-establishment, pro-Drugs, Sex and sf. Their debut album Kick Out The Jams (1969) possesses a splendid energy, not least in the ...
Kornblatt, Marc
(1954- ) US filmmaker, screenwriter and author, in Israel from 2019; he has published contributions to two Shared World series: Flame of the Inquisition (1986) and Mission to World War II (1986) with Susan Nanus (see World War Two) for the Time Machine sequence; and Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party (1987) for the Time Traveler sequence. ...
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 ...