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Sunday 22 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.
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Forsyth, Frederick
(1938-2025) UK author who gained fame with his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1971), and whose books are generally political thrillers. The Shepherd (1975 chap), however, is a sentimental Timeslip or ghost fantasy in which a pilot on Christmas Eve 1957 is saved from crashing by a World War Two pilot in an antique bomber: pilot and plane had been shot down on the Christmas Eve of 1943. ...
Mad 3 Party, The
US Fanzine variously edited by Laurie Mann, Pat Vandenberg and (from 1986) Leslie Turek. Published 1984-1990; 38 issues, US quarto paper, stapled. / This lively newsletter was closely associated with the 1989 Boston Worldcon bid, and then with preparations for the resulting Convention, known as Noreascon 3 (the third Worldcon in Boston). The bid took its theme from Lewis ...
Play by Mail
Term used to describe a game in which the players communicate by (physical) post. Typically all participants send their moves in at regular intervals to a central moderator, who processes the orders simultaneously and returns the results. The moderator is generally the only individual involved to know the current state of all the pieces belonging to every player. Sf examples include Starweb (1976) and ...
World War Three
Following the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs which ended World War Two, a third world War involving nuclear Holocaust became the recurring nightmare of twentieth-century sf throughout the Cold War decades and even beyond. Often it was tacitly assumed that a third world war would constitute the final instalment of a worldwide state of conflict that began in 1914 and whose ...
McConnell, Ashley
(? - ) US author, mostly of Ties, though her first novel, Unearthed (1992), is supernatural horror; she has also written fantasy. She is probably best known for her Ties to two Television series: Quantum Leap (1989-1993), beginning with Quantum Leap: The Novel (1992; vt Quantum Leap: Carny Knowledge ...
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 ...