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Sunday 10 May 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 4 May 2026
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Conway, Gerard F
(1952-2026) US author informally known as Gerry Conway who began his career in Comics, writing some non-fantastic scripts for Marvel Comics, and editing the short-lived 1973 weird fiction magazine The Haunt of Horror and writing for the 1973-1975 anthology Comic Worlds Unknown. He also worked extensively for ...
Goodman, Dickie
(1934-1989) US record producer who with his aspiring songwriter friend Bill Buchanan (1930-1996) launched both their careers with the comic novelty record "The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2" (1956). Inspired by Orson Welles's radio broadcast War of the Worlds (1938), it is credited with being the first record to use the "break-in" technique, which evolved into modern-day sampling. Buchanan and Goodman ...
Babylon Zoo
Short-lived UK pop group founded in Wolverhampton in 1992, who enjoyed chart success with their single "Spaceman" (1996), a number one chart hit in 23 countries including the UK. The song, a glamrock expression of yearning to become an "intergalactic" astronaut, is memorable for its speeded-up opening and closing sections in which singer and writer Jas Mann's (1971- ) usually thrumming voice is rendered squeaky and alien. Two albums, including one ( ...
Webb, Robert
(1972- ) UK comedian, actor, screenwriter and author, best known for Television work in various iterations of the double act Mitchell and Webb, and as actor in many tv comedies and dramas. How Not to Be a Boy (2017) is a memoir. Webb is of sf interest for his first novel, Come Again (2020), whose protagonist, the widow of a man who has died suddenly in his forties, finds herself, by unexplained ...
Amis, Kingsley
(1922-1995) UK author, poet and critic; father of Martin Amis. He took his MA at Oxford, and was a lecturer in English at Swansea 1949-1961 and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1961-1963. Though best known for such social comedies as his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), which won him the sobriquet "Angry Young Man" (a journalistic catch-phrase of the 1950s, applied to several very different authors including Colin ...
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 ...