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Tuesday 8 July 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 7 July 2025
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Bowes, Richard
(1944-2023) US author whose works tended to be set in, and to evoke, a congested, magically altered New York, the city where he lived since his childhood, and which infuses most of his short fiction, little of which is sf. Warchild (1986) and its sequel, Goblin Market (1988), set in an Alternate-History version of the city, follow the growth and adventures of a Telepathic ...
Weiner, Homer
(? - ) US author whose Spacewater Blues (1980) is a Young Adult Satire, whose protagonists' experiences of a very Near Future America are enabled by their transit through another Dimension. They learn, mildly, about Sex. [JC]
Harrington, Alan
(1919-1997) US author, author of The Revelations of Dr Modesto (1955), a novel of ideas about a system called Centralism which brings too much luck, and The Immortalist (1969), an unfictionalized Utopia which describes a world free of death. His sf novel, Paradise 1 (1977), set in the twenty-first century, also tells of potential Immortality and of a continuing struggle to wrest humanity free ...
Cox, Erle
(1873-1950) Australian author and journalist who began to publish fiction as early as 1908, though he was better known as a reviewer and columnist for The Argus and the Australasian 1918-1946, shifting to The Age from 1946. His best-known sf novel is Out of the Silence; a Romance (19 April-25 October 1919 The Argus; 1925; rev 1932; further rev, cut 1947), about the attempt by the female representative of an otherwise extinct super-race ...
Kirn, Walter
(1962- ) US critic and author whose sf novel, The Unbinding (23 June 2006 Slate web; rev 2007), is a Near Future novel about the intricacies and implications of online prying. [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 ...