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Sunday 14 June 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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Duffy, Maureen
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain ...
Zhao Haihong
(1977- ) Chinese author, translator from English and teacher, mainly associated with the Gongshang College of Foreign Languages in Hangzhou, who won a Yinhe Award with a landslide victory for her "Yi'ekasida" ["Jocasta"] (March 1999 Kehuan Shijie), and whose short stories dominated the awards for several years thereafter. Her short story "Tui" (2000 Kehuan Shijie trans Zhao ...
Mahmud, Mustafa
(1921-2009) Egyptian philosopher, journalist and author. As a child from a middle-class family, he was able to enter university and study medicine; due to illness which hospitalized him for two years during his studies, he became interested in philosophy and religion. He started contributing to leading Egyptian Magazines and journals in the late 1940s and in 1960 left his medical career to devote himself fully to writing. He wrote some 80 books, of which the ...
Kaplan, Aline Boucher
(1947- ) UK-born marketing executive and author, in the US from an early age, who began publishing sf with Khyren (1988), in which the protagonist finds herself transported from her conventional existence into a trading outpost on the backward planet Khyren (see Colonization of Other Worlds), where female worth is measured by fertility; the Feminist implications of the tale ...
Fitch, Anna M
(1840-1904) US author of Better Days; Or, a Millionaire of To-Morrow (1891) with her husband Thomas Fitch; it is a Utopia told from a conservative point of view, describing advances in Technology as due to the positive actions of a very rich man who buys part of Manhattan (see New York), which he turns into a commune dominated by males. [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 ...