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Thursday 12 March 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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Hardinge, Frances
(1973- ) UK author who after an early appearance in SFinx (May 1995) began to professionally publish work of genre interest with "Shining Man" in The Dream Zone for January 2001; her works are usually and correctly thought of as fantasy, and adhere closely to fantasy conventions as to landscape and history, though the daedal Underground culture described very fully in A Face Like Glass (2012) ...
Auel, Jean M
(1936- ) US author who is known solely for her enormously successful Earth's Children sequence of Prehistoric SF novels: The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), The Valley of Horses (1982), both assembled as The Clan of the Cave Bear/The Valley of Horses (omni 1994), plus The Mammoth Hunters (1985), all three assembled as Earth's Children (omni 1987), plus ...
Leichter, Hilary
(1985- ) US author whose first novel, Temporary (2020), edges into the water margins of Fantastika through its protagonist's surreally transformative search for what, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, she calls "steadiness". Her experiences – for instance as a "human barnacle" – may be read metaphorically, though they are far more illuminating if taken as literal; under the latter strategy, ...
Macpherson, Ian
(1905-1944) Scots author, farmer and broadcaster who is of genre interest for his last novel, Wild Harbour (1936), in which a devastating Future War – the expected World War Two – breaks out in 1944. The story centres on a married couple who flee to a cave in the hills of Speyside to escape the looming threat of bombs, Biological Weapons and ...
Nadler, Stuart
(? - ) US author whose third novel, Rooms for Vanishing (2025), partially unpacks the complexities of grief and bereavement of a Jewish family, some of whom are Holocaust survivors (see Holocaust Fiction), through a central device from the megatext of Fantastika: the ghosts haunting various characters can be understood as figures of substantial being from more than one ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...