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Sunday 7 December 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.
Site updated on 1 December 2025
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Stoppard, Tom
Working name of Czech-born playwright and screenwriter Tomáš Straussler (1937-2025), in the UK since 1946, the Stoppard surname being acquired from his stepfather when his widowed mother remarried in 1945. His early dramatic work was characterized by extravagant wit and wordplay, and an Absurdist application of logic to surreal or insane situations. Following the broadcast of several Radio plays, his ...
Drinkwater, Mark
Pseudonym of US soldier, publisher and editor Nathaniel King (1767-1848), author of the book-length narrative poem, The United Worlds, a Poem, in Fifty Seven Books (1834), an ambitious secular Utopia set in a Symmes-style Hollow Earth located mostly beneath America; Symmes is mentioned in the text. Though it moves rapidly into the Near Future, the ...
Mace, David
(1951- ) UK translator and author whose first novel, Demon-4 (1984), describes with a quite chilling quasilyrical remoteness a Post-Holocaust suicide mission undertaken, just after the end of World War Three, by the eponymous Cyborg probe in order to dismantle a doomsday device. Most of his later Technothrillers, like ...
Schaeffer, Reneé
(1945-2023) US author the protagonist of whose sf novel Ageless (2024), born in 1850, discovers over the years that she is Immortal, which initially she must disguise. However, well into the twenty-first century, her own accomplishments and the genetic anomaly that has left her young, lead her into spearheading humanity's fraught and fragile progress into distant space. [JC]
Second Hundred Years, The
US tv series (1967-1968). Screen Gem Television for ABC-TV. Produced by Bob Claver, Richard M Bluel. Directors included Gene Reynolds, Russ Mayberry, Jud Taylor. Writers included Stan Cutler, Skip Webster. Cast includes Monte Markham, Frank Maxwell and Arthur O'Connell. 26 30-minute episodes. Colour. / This sf comedy series was in the vein of similar efforts of the era such as My Living Doll (1964-1965), and ...
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 ...