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Saturday 12 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.
Site updated on 7 September 2026
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Braswell, Liz
(? - ) UK-born Videogame producer and author, in America from childhood; known for her series under various pseudonyms, which include Tracy Lynn, J B Stephens, Celia Thomson and the House Name Robb Kidd. Of greatest sf interest is the Big Empty sequence, all as by J B Stephens, and beginning with The Big Empty (2004), a Young Adult series ...
Rose, Mark
(1939- ) US academic and author whose assistance in preparing Kingsley Amis's New Maps of Hell (1960) was acknowledged by its author. An apocalyptic Post-Holocaust short story, "We Would See a Sign" in Spectrum 3 (anth 1963) edited by Amis and Robert Conquest, did not lead to a fiction career, and Rose remains best known in the sf field ...
Contamination: Alien Arriva Sulla Terra
Film (1981; vt Contamination; vt Alien Contamination). Cannon. Directed by Luigi Cozzi. Written by Cozzi. Cast includes Lisa Hahn, Louise Marleau, Martin Mase, Ian McCulloch and Siegfried Rauch. 85 minutes. Colour. / "In Italy," says Cozzi, "when you bring your script to a producer, the first question he asks is ... What film is your film like?" This is one of several competing Italian attempts to exploit the success of Alien (1979). Its ...
Stapp, Robert
(1914-1985) US journalist and author whose sf novel, A More Perfect Union (1970), presents an Alternate History version of America, the Jonbar Point being Abraham Lincoln's decision to evacuate Fort Sumter in 1861, leading to a separate Confederate government. By 1981 the CSA has become even more singularly unpleasant than its fount in Slavery might suggest, and is threatening ...
Gillette, King Camp
(1855-1932) US salesman and industrialist who partially invented and wholly made practicable the disposal safety razor, founding the company that now bears his name in 1901; his works as an author, sometimes as by King C Gillette, were universally focused on Utopian solutions to the dilemmas he saw infecting the rapidly expanding capitalist world, beginning with The Human Drift (1894), which advocates a socialist, pollution-free, non-competition-based ...
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 ...