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Saturday 21 September 2024
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 17 September 2024
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Westerfeld, Scott
(1963- ) US composer and author – married since 2001 to Justine Larbalestier – whose first sf novel, Polymorph (1997), a tale immersed in a heatedly entangled New York, features a Shapeshifter protagonist who seems to match the city, both protagonist and venue being rendered in ways that hint of his Urban Fantasies [see The ...
Icons
A number of historical, fictional and mythical characters have acquired iconic status in sf. Most such figures from myth and Religion have their proper home in Fantasy, but nevertheless appear repeatedly in sf and Science Fantasy – not only Shaggy God Stories but subtler rationalizations or reworkings of legend. In this category are ...
Military SF
War and especially Future War are enduring sf themes. The melodramatic excesses of Space-Opera warfare faded with the pulps, although they were never to die out entirely. Complementing such extravagance, there grew up a more disciplined and more realistic notion of the kind of armies which might fight interplanetary and interstellar wars, and the kinds of Weapons they might use. ...
Rohan, Michael Scott
(1951-2018) Scottish publisher, editor and author with a degree in law, with Elsevier International Publishing 1973-1978 and since freelance. Following a fiction debut with "The Planetoid in the Case: A Matter of Unnatural Law" in the Oxford University SF Group's Amateur Magazine SFinx #7 for January 1973, he began publishing sf professionally with "Fidei Defensor" in Andromeda 2 (anth 1977) edited by Peter ...
Free, Colin
(1925-1996) Australian author whose The Soft Kill (1973), set in a totalitarian Near Future world in the depths of an Overpopulation crisis (an emphasis which clearly dates Free's concerns, as later in the twentieth century overpopulation became an issue more often ignored than confronted); the privileged few live in elevated Keeps. [JC]
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 ...