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Friday 13 February 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.
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Penrice, Arthur
Pseudonym of UK author George Theodosius Boughton Kyngdon (1821-1916). The narrator of Skyward and Earthward (1875), whose name is Arthur Penrice, travels to the Moon in an advanced Balloon, where he discovers a race of Telepaths living in caves; Penrice then travels to Mars, also inhabited. The second half of the tale is set tamely back on Earth. [JC]
Laika
UK indie-rock band founded in 1993 by US-born musician and singer Margaret Fiedler McGinnis (1967- ) and UK bass-guitarist John Frenett (1970- ) and named (of course) for the first mammal to orbit the earth. The group's complexly rhythmic, slippery, hypnotic music manifests a persistent fascination with outer space. The band's first release, Silver Apples of the Moon (1995) – this album has no relation to Morton ...
Smit, Sam
(? - ) UK author whose The Serendipity Foundation (2016) focuses on the twenty-first century plan of an aeons-old cabal of Secret Masters to blackmail the world into behaving sanely. The tone is forcedly comic, but intermittently relaxes into seriousness. [JC]
Ghosts of Mars
Film (2001). Screen Gems presents a Storm King production. Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Larry Sulkis & Carpenter. Cast includes Joanna Cassidy, Ice Cube, Clea Duvall, Pam Grier, Natasha Henstridge and Jason Statham. 93 minutes. Colour. / In 2176, colonists mining a part-terraformed and irrelevantly matriarchal Mars activate the dormant bodiless form of a windborne native intelligence, which possesses the ...
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 ...