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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.
Site updated on 9 March 2026
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North, David
(? - ) US or Canadian author of whom nothing is known – whose Time Warriors sequence of Military SF adventures, beginning with Time Warriors #1: Fuse Point (1991), sends its protagonists, a Vietnam vet and his barbarian sidekick named Brom, via Time Travel into various conflicts and Parallel Worlds, where they act, with ...
Counter-Earth
An imagined extra planet of our own solar system, supposedly sharing Earth's orbit but always concealed from observation by its position on the far side of the Sun (that is, at or near the L3 Lagrange Point of the Earth-Sun system). The concept is ancient: Pythagoras proposed both the world, which he called Antichthon, and the mechanism of its concealment in the fifth century BCE. Although Counter-Earth – or ...
Diaman, N A
(1936-2020) US photographer – as Nikos Diaman – and author of gay sf novels, including Ed Dean Is Queer (1978) and The Fourth Wall (1980), both of which see Near Future America as a Dystopia for homosexuals, though the first ends hopefully; and Private Nation (1997), whose gay protagonists must exist in a world oppressively subject to privatization gone mad. [JC]
Billett, Mabel Broughton
(1892-1964) Canadian author, in USA from 1936; of her four detective novels, one is of some sf interest. In The Robot Detective (1932), an immobile Robot, fed information through punch-cards (and better perhaps described as a primitive Computer), discusses a case with his/its human operator, who then goes out into the British Columbia landscape to capture the villain. Her fourth novel, "The Smooth Silence" (1936 ...
Madden, Timothy A
(1941- ) US author of Outbanker (1990), a Space Opera, and of The Bruja's Tale (2008), and occult fantasy. [JC]
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 ...