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Monday 29 May 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for 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 29 May 2023
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
Balch, William S
(1806-1887) US minister, politician journalist and author, mostly of nonfiction; of sf interest is A Peculiar People; Or, Reality in Romance (1881), in which a visitor to the secluded land of Nussara in the Middle East (see Lost Race) discovers there a successful Utopia run on religious lines. Balch was a minister in the Universalist Church, a faith which espouses the doctrine that God did not create humans to damn them. ...
Beatty, Paul
(1962- ) US poet and author whose fictions comprise a deeply Satirical and hilarious anatomy of "Post-Racial America", a land where DWB (Driving While Black) is not a technical offense. The astronomically popular poet who narrates The White Boy Shuffle (1996) – his first collection, Watermelanin, has sold 126,000,000 copies – copes with an absurd but recognizable California (his ...
Nathenson, Joseph
(1925-2006) US author of Deep, Very Deep Space (1978), in which a complex Starship heads towards the end of the universe. [JC]
Bechtel, Greg
(1971- ) Canadian author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Black Magic" in Challenging Destiny for March 1998; he has to date published only short fiction, the best of which was assembled as Boundary Problems (coll 2014). The title of this collection nicely expresses an essential component in the tales: a transgressively Equipoisal approach to ...
Graham, Jo
(1968- ) US author, whose early work, beginning with Black Ships (2008), which is based on Virgil's Aeneid (circa 29-19 BC), and is fantasy, as is Lost Things (2012) with Melissa Scott, which seems to be the first volume of a series of fantasies set in a modestly Steampunk 1920s, where gods and goddesses are discovered beneath Lake Nemi. Of sf interest is a series of ...
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. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began publishing sf reviews in 1964 and sf proper with "A Man Must Die" in New Worlds for ...