SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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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Ex Machina
Role Playing Game (2004). Guardians of Order. Designed by Bruce Baugh, Rebecca Borgstrom, Christian Gossett, Bradley Kayl, Michelle Lyons. / Ex Machina is a game of all the many Cyberpunks, from the alternate 1980s of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Walter Jon Williams's Hardwired (1986) through ...
Holmes, Clara H
(1838-1927) US author, active from the mid-1860s, whose collection, Floating Fancies Among the Weird and the Occult (coll 1898), contains a Lost Race tale, "Nordhung Nordjansen", whose sea-captain protagonist guides his ship to the North Pole, which is indeed a magnetic pole; from there, he is cast into a Hollow Earth as described by John Cleves Symmes, whose "mist being" ...
Olan, Susan Torian
(1947-1999) US author whose The Earth Remembers (1990) is a cagily written example of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety of Post-Holocaust fiction. Taking the form of a Western set along the Texas-Mexico border, the tale features Mutants, Amerindians and nuclear devices along with the usual protagonists and antagonists. [JC]
Scott, Ridley
(1937- ) UK film-maker who has worked mostly in the USA. He began his career as a set designer for the BBC, including work on the adaptation of John Brunner's "Some Lapse of Time" (June-July 1963 Science Fantasy) for the first season of Out of the Unknown (1965). After making a name directing a series of stylish, inventive television commercials, ...
Kent, Melanie
(? - ) US author of an unremarkable Tie to the Television series Quantum Leap: Quantum Leap XV: Heat Wave (1997). [JC]
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 ...