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Sunday 20 July 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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Williams, Tess
(1954-2025) UK-born teacher, editor and author, in Australia for many years, there receiving a degree in literature from Curtin University and an MA in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Padwan Affair" in She's Fantastical (anth 1995) edited by Judith Raphael Buckrich and Lucy Sussex. Of sf interest are two novels: Map of Power (1996), set mostly in a ...
Altman, Robert
(1925-2006) US Cinema director, producer and screenwriter perhaps best known for directing the films M*A*S*H (1970) and Nashville (1975). His first film of clear genre interest is Countdown (1967), a Space-Flight thriller anticipating NASA's 1969 landing on the Moon. This was followed by the more fantastical movies ...
Ward, David [2]
(1967- ) Canadian teacher and author whose Grasslands Young Adult sequence beginning with Escape the Mask (2001) places its young cast in a rural world dominated, all the same, by a Dystopian tyranny, which they must escape. Archipelago (2008) takes its contemporary protagonist via Time Travel 14,000 years into the past, where he interacts with ...
Davidson, Michael
Pseudonym of Michael Zeik (? - ), US author of two sf novels: The Karma Machine (1975), a dystopian vision of a Computer-dominated world; and Daughter of Is: A Science Fiction Epic: An "Else-when" Parable (1978), an Alternate-History tale. Davidson should not be confused with the poet Michael Davidson (1944- ). [JC]
Hogan, Robert J
(1897-1963) US author, mostly of adventure tales for American Pulp magazines, who is of sf interest mainly for the G-8 and his Battle Aces sequence, all 115 novel-length instalments seemingly written by him. They comprised the essential contents of the 115 issues of G-8 and His Battle Aces (1933-1944); many individual issues have been reproduced in facsimile form in the twenty-first century and sold as books (they are ...
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 ...