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Thursday 16 July 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 14 July 2026
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Hookham, Albert E
(1870-1958) UK author of Amid the Strife; Or, the Lust of Mars (1909), a Future War tale whose venues are less specific than usual for this period, as the tale concerns a conflict between Britain and Bryghtland. [JC]
Erskine, Douglas
Pseudonym of Scots-descended Canadian lawyer John Stuart Buchan (1852-1927). It has implausibly been suggested that Erskine was a pseudonym of John Buchan – perhaps because his son's full name was John Norman Stuart Buchan (1911-1996). Erskine's novel – A Bit of Atlantis (1900) – lacks any resemblance to Buchan's own work of the time; in this tale, a Scottish Canadian inventor, who descends from lost Atlanteans, is shipwrecked on ...
Cold War
The prolonged post-World War Two (roughly 1946-1991) state of tension between the West – principally the USA and its NATO allies – and the Warsaw Pact countries headed by the USSR was inevitably reflected in sf written in the shadow of what at times seemed to be an inevitable nuclear World War Three. Such past hopes of salvation as the Pax Aeronautica were no longer even ...
Gerard, Morice
Pseudonym of UK clergyman and author John Jessop Teague (1856-1929), author of many historical novels, and of The New Order (1917), a vision of the Near Future from a staunchly rightwing perspective. [JC]
George, Jon
(? - ) UK author of two sf novels, after some unidentified shorter work. In Faces of Mist and Flame (2004), a late twenty-first-century mathematician creates a Time Viewer through which she is able to observe – in complacent safety – and to share acoustically the horrific experiences in World War Two of a soldier who creates for himself an inner fantasy narrative ...
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 ...