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Friday 14 August 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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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Lymington, John
Pseudonym of UK author John Newton Chance (1911-1983), prolific author from 1935 under his own name, most of this output being detective-thrillers; as John Drummond he wrote numerous Sexton Blake (see Sexton Blake Library) tales between 1944 and 1955, and as Desmond Reid (a House Name) his only sf contribution to that series, Anger at World's End (1963). His first ...
Taylor, Robert Lewis
(1912-1998) US author, often of Humour, best known for the nonfantastic The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1959), which won a Pulitzer Price; in his sf novel, Adrift in a Boneyard (1947), the few survivors of a mysterious Disaster come, after long travel through the ruins of New York in the mode of the Last Man tale, to a peaceful ...
Agbabi, Patience
(1955- ) UK poet and author, active from around 1995; her fourth volume of poems, Telling Tales (coll of linked poems 2014), comprises a retelling of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century). She is of sf interest for her first novel, The Infinity (2020), which initiates the Young Adult Leap Cycle sequence. The young protagonist, who with some others are able to engage in ...
Tine, Robert
(1954- ) US author who has also written as by Richard Harding, and who is probably best known for the Outrider Survivalist sequence under this name, beginning with The Outrider (1984) and ending with The Outrider #5: Built to Kill (1985). As usual for this subgenre, the Holocaust is vengefully enjoyed. Works under his own name include ...
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 ...