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Monday 15 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 ...
Meltzer, David
(1937-2016) US jazz guitarist, poet and author whose sf is almost entirely restricted to two sequences of erotic novels published by Essex House at the end of the 1960s, though he had published a very few stories earlier. The first sequence – the Agency series comprising The Agency (1968), The Agent (1968) and How Many Blocks in the Pile? (1969), all three assembled as The Agency Trilogy (omni ...
Mysterious Stranger
John Gardner has been credited for claiming that there are only two plots: journey and arrival; it may be added that the stranger who comes to town may well be returning from outside: an outsider who knows the inside. Though some examples of the two main plots are different aspects of a single story (perhaps most are; see discussion of The Odyssey below), this entry focuses on the second primal tale. The first Mysterious Stranger in the ...
Boggon, Martyn
(1934-1997) UK author of some crime fiction and of The Inevitable Hour (1968) in which, after a nuclear Holocaust destroys Chicago and much of the rest of America, a group of survivors in a claustrophobic bomb shelter engage in Post-Holocaust activities which are ultimately criminous. [JC]
Swift, Jonathan
(1667-1745) Irish satirist, cleric and poet, dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, from 1713, who began publishing with the relatively innocuous Ode: to the King on his Irish Expedition (1691 chap), but who soon composed A Tale of a Tub [for subtitle see Checklist] (1704) anonymous, written almost a decade before it was published. The book incorporated a second Satire, usually called today "The Battle of the Books", which used the imagery ...
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 ...