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Wednesday 10 June 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 8 June 2026
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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Phillips, Rog
Working name of US author Roger Phillip (not Phillips as often cited) Graham (1909-1966), a prolific contributor to the sf magazines of the late 1940s and 1950s, often writing as by Craig Browning; married to Mari Wolf 1950-1955. His first story was "Let Freedom Ring!" in December 1945 for Amazing Stories, which, along with its companion magazine Fantastic Adventures, remained his most regular ...
Politics
Most of the works which we can characterize with hindsight as Proto SF are political fantasies. The earnest and constructive aspect of this endeavour is generally displayed in Utopias, the mocking and corrosive aspect in Satires. The desire to make political statements has continued to be the main motive force in works of sf by Mainstream Writers, although modern ...
Kunstler, James Howard
(1948- ) US journalist, cultural historian and author who may be best known for nonfiction studies of the contemporary American urban and suburban like The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (1994), where he argues that suburbia is not only an inhumanely dysfunctional habitat, grotesquely and fatally dependent on the automobile to survive at all, even in the short term. A later study, ...
Mottram, R H
(1883-1971) UK banker, poet and author, in active service during World War One; he published in 1907 and later some early poems as by J Marjoram, but effectively initiated his long and prolific writing career with the famous Spanish Farm trilogy beginning with The Spanish Farm (1924), a fictionalized chronicle of his World War One experiences upon which his reputation stands, though all his work shows 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 ...