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Sunday 15 June 2025
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 June 2025
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Longyear, Barry B
(1942-2025) US author and editor who ran a printing company with his wife before beginning to write in 1977, beginning to publish work of genre interest with "The Tryouts" in Asimov's for November/December 1978. Before his 1981 hospitalization for alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs – an experience which formed the basis of his non-sf novel Saint Mary Blue (1988) – he had already published prolifically, sometimes as by Frederick ...
Young, Louisa
(1960- ) UK author, who has written as by Zizou Corder with her daughter Isabel Adamakoh Young; partner from 2016 of Michel Faber. Most of her fiction has been nonfantastic, though the Lionboy sequence for relatively young readers, beginning with Lionboy (2003) with Isabel Adamakoh Young as by Zizou Corder, is of some sf interest. The tale is Equipoisally set partially in a ...
Black Magic M-66
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (1987). Based on the Manga by Masamune Shirow. AIC. Directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Written by Masamune Shirow. Voice cast includes Ichiro Nagai, Yoshiko Sakakibara and Chisa Yokoyama. 47 minutes. Colour. / When a sabotaged military aircraft crashes into a forest, the two M-66 anti-personnel automated soldiers (see Androids) it ...
Johnston, Paul
(1957- ) Scottish author, partially resident in Greece, whose noirish Quint Dalrymple sequence – comprising Body Politic (1997), The Bone Yard (1998), Water of Death (1999), The Blood Tree (2000), The House of Dust (2001), Heads or Hearts (2015), Skeleton Blues (2016) and Impolitic Corpses (2019) – is a series of detections set in the ...
Thomson, Amy
(1958- ) US author whose first novel, Virtual Girl (1993), cunningly updates the Icon of the female Robot, long a locus for uneasy speculation among older sf writers (see Feminism). Maggie, the protagonist of this Near-Future tale, is an AI and consequently illegal, as independent artificial intelligences have been ...
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 ...