SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 16 June 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ansible Editions
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. ...
Clarke, I F
(1918-2009) UK Intelligence officer and code-cracker during World War Two, Professor of English (from 1964) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and author. His first major publication was the Bibliography ...
Woolf, A L
(? - ) UK author who wrote the novel Southern Exploration (1953) as by Adam Dale, a House Name of Curtis Warren, for which publisher Woolf also wrote non-sf under his own name. [SH/DRL]
Piziks, Steven
(1967- ) US author, who also writes as by Steven Harper, and who began publishing work of genre interest with "Hoard" in Sword and Sorcerers IX (anth 1992) edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. He is noted in particular for two series: the In the Company of Mind sequence comprising In the Company of Mind (1998) and Corporate Mentality (1999), whose young protagonist, in a universe ...
Idol, Billy
(1955- ) Stage name of UK pop star William Michael Albert Broad, who merits mention here only on account of his album Cyberpunk (1993), a punk-electronica concept album inspired by Idol's reading of William Gibson's Neuromancer. Many of Idol's earlier rock-punk songs are catchy, and some have proved enduring, but this album is very bad. [AR]
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 ...