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Saturday 8 August 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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Greer, Tom
Working name of Irish surgeon Thomas Greer (1846/1847-1904) for his writing; he lived in the UK from about 1880. In his A Modern Daedalus (1885) an Irish lad invents a one-man flying device (see Inventions; Transportation) which straps to the shoulders. The UK Government attempts to persuade him to use it against Ireland. Though he longs simply for peace, UK military action forces him onto the side of the ...
Freireich, Valerie J
(1952- ) US business transactional attorney and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Ballgame" for Starshore in 1991. Her four novels to date – Becoming Human (1995), Testament (1995), The Beacon (1996) and The Imposter [sic] (1997) – are loosely connected within a broad Space Opera galactic civilization whose dominant union, the Harmony ...
Gnosspelius, Staffan
(1976- ) Swedish-born illustrator and graphic artist, in the UK since 1999, active from around then. He has illustrated picture books to texts by Swedish authors (published only in Swedish); the books for which he is wholly responsible have appeared in English, beginning with The Tristan Story (graph 2004) whose young protagonist loses his "crying", which he must search for in the bowels of his uncle's car: a Little-Big quest into a huge world growing huger, ...
Wells, Robison
(1978- ) US author whose Young Adult Variant sequence comprising Variant (2011) and Feedback (2012), set initially in a highschool that turns out to be a coercive Keep whose students/inmates are forced to enter into actions and conflicts whose entailments loosely evoke Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985); in the second volume, ...
Jeschke, Wolfgang
(1936-2015) Czech-born editor and author, in Germany after 1945; winner of the 1987 Harrison Award for achievements in international sf. He began to publish sf with "Die Anderen" ["The Others"] in 1959, but first became strongly involved with the genre in 1969 when, while working as co-editor of Kinders Literaturlexikon he edited as a freelancer the Science Fiction fur Kenner ["Science Fiction for Connoisseurs"] series for Lichtenberg Verlag. In 1973 he took ...
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 ...