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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 ...
Myers, Robert J
(1924-2011) US author of a short series – the Frankenstein sequence comprising The Cross of Frankenstein (1975) and The Slave of Frankenstein (1976) – in which the Frankenstein Monster is seen through a horror lens, with sf elements not emphasized (but see Horror in SF). The Virgin and the Vampire (1977) lacks any sf content. [JC]
Price, Susan
(1955- ) UK author, mostly of fantasies for younger children and for Young Adult readers, from around 1973. The Ghost World sequence beginning with The Ghost Drum (1987) is a powerful evocation of Arctic cultures, in which shamanistic beliefs (and other elements) are taken as literal descriptions of the world. She is of strong sf interest for two late series. The Sterkarm sequence, comprising ...
Beyond the Stellar Empire
Role Playing Game (1981). Adventures By Mail. Designed by Jack Everitt, Robert Cook, Michael Popolizio. / Beyond the Stellar Empire was a Play by Mail game created in the US, resembling a massively multiplayer Space Sim such as EVE Online (2003) but mediated entirely through text and run in slow motion. In 1992 the UK company KJC Games (KJC) ...
Watson, Simon
(? - ) UK author of No Man's Land (1975), set in a Dystopian Near Future Britain based on a coercive concentration of the working class community-destructive high-rise tenements. Something similar had in fact happened in the real world during the twentieth century after World War Two, a process flagrantly contradictive of the pre-War English ...
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 ...