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Friday 16 October 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 12 October 2026
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Edwards, Malcolm
(1949-2026) UK editor, critic and publisher, educated at Cambridge, where he graduated in anthropology. Active in UK sf Fandom in the 1970s and early 1980s, he published the first complete text of James Blish's "The Science in Science Fiction" (May 1951-May 1952 Science Fiction Quarterly) in his Fanzine Quicksilver #2 in 1971; edited the ...
Kreisheimer, H C
(1897-1972) US author of The Whooping Crane (1955 chap), in which a community enforcedly becomes a communist Dystopia, with the eponymous airplane, which is ambivalently futuristic, symbolically active in the tale. [JC]
Heartfield, Kate
(1977- ) Canadian journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Pair of Ragged Claws" in Black Treacle for March/April 2013. Her first novel, Armed in Her Fashion (2018) is a fantasy set in fourteenth-century northern Europe involving revenants and Shapeshifters and strong women; an earlier novella, The Course of True Love (2016 ebook), is set in a ...
Russell, Addison Peale
(1826-1912) US journalist, politician and author whose Sub-Coelum: A Sky-Built Human World (1893) is a Utopia written, like so many others from this decade, to counter the influence of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888). The setting is an unspecified Near Future, in a land with no name, whose inhabitants – who constantly observe and report upon one ...
Island Claws
Film (1980; vt Giant Claws). Produced by Ted Swanson. Directed by Hernan Cardenas. Written by Jack Cowden and Ricou Browning from a story by Hernan Cardenas and Colby Cardenas. Cast includes Dick Callinan, Steve Hanks, Robert Lansing, Jo McDonnell and Barry Nelson. 90 minutes, cut to 82 minutes. Colour. / Reporter Jan Raines (McDonnell) visit a small Island off the Florida coast to report on Dr McNeal (Nelson), who is working to improve crabs as a ...
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 ...