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Monday 9 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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Trevor, Meriol
(1919-2000) UK author whose Alternate-History tales in the World Dionysius sequence – The Forest and the Kingdom (1949), Hunt the King, Hide the Fox (1950) and The Fires and the Stars (1951) – convey a bright childlike nostalgia for a planet which in some regards resembles Earth but whose history is more satisfactory than ours. This angle of view may be accounted for by the fact that, with ...
Blake, Stacey
Working name of Francis William Stacey Blake (1873-1964), UK journalist, author and water-colour artist whose fiction consists almost exclusively of adventure stories for boys, such as "The Derelict Hunters: A Thrilling Story of the Dread Sargasso Sea" (29 April 1908 Chums) as by Stacey-Blake. His three book-length tales of sf interest are Beyond the Blue: The Story of a Great Adventure (December 1914-June 1915 London Magazine; 1920), a ...
France, Anatole
Working name of Jacques Anatole-François Thibault (1844-1924), French author active from the early 1860s until his death; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. His essayistic "pagan" Satires seem perhaps less relevant now than formerly, their amused rationality failing to bite with sufficient savagery into targets like official religion and sexual prudery. Of sf interest are Sur la pierre blanche (1904 ...
ab Hugh, Dafydd
(1960- ) US author, born David M Friedman, whose Welsh-sounding name has been legalized. He is perhaps best known for his novella, "The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured his Larinks, a Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk" (August 1990 Asimov's). This is a striking Post-Holocaust tale whose linguistic invention recalls Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980), but which is ...
Year of the Sex Olympics, The
UK tv drama (1968). British Broadcasting Corporation. Directed by Michael Elliott. Written by Nigel Kneale. Cast includes Brian Cox, George Murcell, Suzanne Neve, Martin Potter, Lesley Roach, Leonard Rossiter, Hira Talfrey, Vickery Turner and Tony Vogel. 103 minutes. Black and white (original colour print wiped by BBC). / Long thought lost or irretrievably mutilated, The Year of the Sex Olympics was released in 2020 by 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 ...