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Thursday 10 September 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.
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Verhelst, Peter
(1962- ) Belgian/Flemish poet, playwright and author, active from the mid 1980s; at least two of his novels are of genre interest. In Tongkat: Een Verhalenbordeel ["Tonguecat: A Story Brothel"] (1999; trans Sherry Marx as Tonguecat: A Novel 2003), the titan Prometheus leaves his primordial world and comes to an unnamed Labyrinthine Near Future City ...
Hoare, Andy
(? - ) UK author involved in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, his Ties including Warhammer 40,000: The 13th Black Crusade (2004), Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Star (2006) and Warhammer 40,000: Star of Damocles (2007). [JC]
Hutchinson, David
(1960- ) UK author who published four volumes of stories by the age of twenty-one – Thumbprints (coll 1978), which is mostly fantasy, Fools' Gold (coll 1979), Torn Air (coll 1980) and The Paradise Equation (coll 1981), all as David Hutchinson – and then moved into journalism. The deftness and quiet humaneness of his work was better than precocious, though the deracinatedness of the worlds depicted in the ...
Lauria, Frank
(1935-2022) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with Doctor Orient (1970), opening the Dr Owen Orient sequence of occult thrillers in urban-fantasy vein, in which the eponymous investigator – gifted with Psi Powers – tangles with such expected menaces as Vampires, voodoo, Werewolves and Zombies, these threats often taking ...
Johnson, Samuel
(1709-1784) UK poet, critic, playwright, lexicographer and author of one novel, The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale (1759; rev 1759; vt The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia: An Asiatic Tale 1768; vt The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia: A Tale 1787), written to pay for his mother's funeral (he got £100 – a large sum – for the first printing). The profusion of vts above comes from our normal practice of citing title ...
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 ...