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Monday 14 July 2025
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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Robertson, Tim
(1944- ) UK-born Australian actor and screenwriter whose Mary Shelley: (A Smoked Opera for the Quick and the Dead) (1983) is a script of sf interest (see Mary Shelley). [JC]
Paul, Barbara
(1931-2022) US author who began publishing sf with "Answer 'Affirmative' or 'Negative'" in Analog for April 1972, but who became much better known in the 1980s for her detective novels, of which she has written at least twenty; one of them, Liars and Tyrants and People Who Turn Blue (1980), depends for its plot upon a psychic character. Earlier Paul wrote several sf novels – An Exercise for Madmen (1978), Pillars of Salt ...
Hartland, Christopher
(? - ) UK author whose self-identification as queer and autistic usefully frames the lines of energy driving his first novel, the Young Adult Against the Stars (2023), whose protagonist learns his true nature through a commercial Time Viewer device known as GlimpseTech. The 45 second "glimpse" given him into his future tells him who he's in love with; against an increasingly ...
Marshall, Helen
(1983- ) Canadian academic, author and poet, in UK from 2014, more recently in Australia; partner of Vince Haig (who writes as Malcolm Devlin) since 2015. She began to publish poetry around 2004, and published her first work of genre interest with "Skin" in Future Lovecraft (anth 2011) edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R Stiles. Most of her work – much of which has been ...
Essex House
A short-lived (1968-1969) Los Angeles publishing imprint, a subsidiary of Milton Luros's Parliament News, Inc, specializing in highbrow erotica. Many Essex House novelists were young serious writers (several of them poets), and some used scenarios drawn from sf and fantasy, including future Dystopias, as settings for their pornography. About half the 42 titles published by Essex House were sf/fantasy; they included novels by Philip José ...
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 ...