SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 12 March 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 9 March 2026
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Orbit Books
Publishing line launched in 1974 as the sf/fantasy imprint of the London-based company Macdonald Futura, which was bought by Little, Brown in 1992; in 2006 Little, Brown was in turn acquired by Hachette Livre. / Along with a medley of mostly though not exclusively US reprint works, early Futura/Orbit releases included paperbacks of significant retro Anthologies edited by Brian Aldiss, such as Space Opera (anth ...
Wright, Kirby
(? - ) US author of The End, My Friend: Prelude to the Apocalypse (dated 2013 but 2014), a Near Future California after central governments collapse; the protagonists trek eastwards in search of a stable world. [JC]
Stewart, Ian
(1945- ) UK mathematician, currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick; he was elected to the Royal Society in 2001. His sf novels Wheelers (2000) and Heaven (2004), together with the nonfiction The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994) and other popular-science works of sf interest, were written in collaboration with Jack Cohen – whom ...
Welsh, Louise
(1965- ) UK author whose six novels to date range across several genres, from detections to historicals, none of the first five with fantastic content; of sf interest is The Plague Times Trilogy beginning with A Lovely Way to Burn (2014). Disaster in the form of an extremely deadly Pandemic known as the Sweats strikes very-Near Future ...
Poyer, Joe
Working name of US author Joseph John Poyer (1939-2018) for his fiction, beginning with "Mission 'Red Clash'" in Analog for December 1965, Analog being a magazine with which he was closely associated. Of his novels, Operation Malacca (1968), about the use of talking Dolphins for military purposes, and North Cape (1969) are Technothrillers. Tunnel War ...
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 ...