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Sunday 19 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.
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Reincarnation
The idea of reincarnation exerts a considerable fascination; its fashionability was renewed in the latter decades of the twentieth century by Hypnotists who claimed to facilitate a "regression" of their subjects which allows access to memories of "former lives". Serial reincarnation is one of the standard varieties of Immortality. In Fantasy the notion is an axiom of the curious subgenre of "transcendental ...
Wooding, Chris
(1977- ) UK author, usually for the Young Adult market, and usually fantasy or horror, including his first novel, Catchman (1998). His most successful singleton is probably The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray (2001), whose Amnesia-ridden protagonist possesses unknowingly the key to understanding a post-Pandemic crime-ridden London ...
Barb Wire
Film (1996). Polygram Film Entertainment. Directed by David Hogan. Written by Chuck Pfarrer and Ilene Chaiken, from a story by Chaiken; based on the Comics character created by Chris Warren for Dark Horse Comics. Cast includes Amir Aboulela, Pamela Anderson, Xander Berkeley, Temuera Morrison, Steve Railsback and Victoria Rowell. 98 minutes. Colour. / 2017: a Dystopian Near Future America with ...
Howard, Maude Lesseuer
(? -? ) US author of Miriam and the Mystic Brotherhood (1912), an occult fantasy whose narrative extends well into the Near Future, as members of the eponymous order gain aetheric visions of a transformed America, with the previous government replaced by a high-Technology Utopia; other planets are also seen as inhabited. [JC]
Haldeman, Jack C, II
(1941-2002) US biologist and author, married to Vol Haldeman and later (in 1995) to Barbara Delaplace, who began publishing sf with "Garden of Eden" in Fantastic for December 1971. His fifty or so stories tend to avoid the more serious Space-Opera themes, sticking generally to Games-and-Sports tales about Robot football players, ...
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 ...