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Friday 13 March 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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Last Woman on Earth
Film (1960). Filmgroup. Produced and directed by Roger Corman. Written by Towne. Cast includes Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland and Edward Wain (pseudonym of Robert Towne). 71 minutes. Colour. / For unexplained reasons (war?) the world is drained of oxygen for several hours; the lone survivors (as far as we know) are three scuba divers: two men (one wealthy and aggressive, one effete and intellectual) and the first man's wife. Scientifically ...
Neville, Jill
(1932-1997) Australian journalist, playwright and author, mostly in the UK from 1951; she was the sister of Richard Neville (1941-2016), editor of Oz in the 1960s and author of Footprints of the Future: Handbook for the Third Millennium (2002). Neville was not much drawn to sf, though her second novel, The Love-Germ (1969), is an occasionally sharp sf Satire set in the Near Future, which traces the ...
Lindsey, Johanna
(1952-2019) German-born US author of romance novels, mostly with historical settings, which regularly appeared on the New York Times bestseller list; the first was Captive Bride (1977) [not listed below]. Lindsey is of sf interest for the Ly-San-Ter trilogy opening with Warrior's Woman (1990), whose tough yet virginal female protagonist goes on an interstellar quest (with a wisecracking AI sidekick) to free her world's women from ...
Thébault, Eugène
(1864-1942) French journalist and author who also wrote as by Paul Zahori. He is of sf interest for Radio-Terreur (23 June 1927-?? 1928 L'Aventure as "Radio-Terreur, grand roman de Mystère"; 1929; trans Fletcher Pratt as "Radio-Terror" June-October 1933 Wonder Stories; 2011), in which a Mad Scientist declares his intention to use his ...
Futures Studies
"Futures Studies" is the most common name for the interdisciplinary study of potential future developments and conditions. It has displaced earlier terms like Futurology and Futuristics which reflected the goal of creating a new discipline with mathematical tools capable of accurate Prediction. Frequent failures of prediction have tempered that ambition and complexity theory has highlighted the inability of any forecasting methods ...
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 ...