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Sunday 15 February 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 February 2026
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Aronofsky, Darren
(1969- ) US filmmaker whose sf films to date have been the Mathematical psychodrama π or Pi (1998) and the Immortality quest epic The Fountain (2007); he also co-wrote David Twohy's World War Two haunted-submarine (see ...
Stuart, Francis
(1902-2000) Australian-born poet, playwright, journalist and author, in Ireland from infancy, in active service at the end of World War One as a translator for the British and French armies; in 1918, he married Iseult Gonne (1894-1954), daughter of Maud Gonne MacBride (1866-1953), and remained active in the IRA and in Irish politics until World War Two, which he spent in Germany as an Irish neutral, partly to continue his advocacy of Irish interests. This ...
Blumlein, Michael
(1948-2019) US medical doctor who worked full-time at UCSF until recently, and author whose output in the latter capacity, though he published only four novels and four collections, had considerable impact on the field, beginning with his first published story, "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" in Interzone for Spring 1984. This tale remains one of the most astonishingly savage political assaults ever published. The target is Ronald Reagan, ...
Gardner, Martin
(1914-2010) US mathematician, amateur conjuror, journalist and author of many books of popular science, along with several volumes of puzzles and games. In the Name of Science (1952; rev vt Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 1957) is an iconoclastic and amusing nonfiction book about Pseudoscience: cults, fads and hoaxes existing on the fringes of science, with chapters on Hollow-Earth 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 ...