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Friday 20 June 2025
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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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Shiner, Lewis
(1950- ) US musician and author who began publishing sf with "Tinker's Damn" for Galileo #5 in October 1977, and who wrote a substantial number of tales before beginning to assemble them in Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (coll 1990), The Edges of Things (coll 1991) and Love in Vain (coll 2001). His Collected Stories (coll 2010) conveniently assembles more than half of ...
Stintzi, John Elizabeth
Canadian poet and author whose first novel Vanishing Monuments (2020) evokes images out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize the growing dementia of its protagonist's mother. They are of sf interest (see in particular Absurdist SF) for their second novel, My Volcano (2022), which multiply Equipoises topoi out of various genres to depict a kind of ...
Contagion
Film (2011). Warner Bros, Participant, Imagenation Abu Dhabi. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Scott Z Burns. Cast includes Tien You Chui, Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston, Matt Damon, Jennifer Ehle, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, Griffin Kane, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet. 106 minutes. Colour. / Contagion is a fiction film depicting the stunningly rapid spread across the planet of a coronavirus originating zoonotically from a single infected pig ...
Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir (1965- ) Icelandic singer and composer, widely celebrated for her idiosyncratic vocal style and a left-field eccentricity of musical focus that often shades into sf; she has worked on occasion with the singer-songwriter and author Sjón between 1995 and 2011. "Human Behaviour", her first hit (from Debut, 1993) takes the position of a ...
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 ...