SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 11 November 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 10 November 2025
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Powlik, James
(? - ) Canadian oceanographer and author, whose first novel, Sea Change (1999), sees the oceans threatened by mutated micro-organisms (see Horror in SF; Mutants); second tale dealing with the threatened oceans of the world, Meltdown (2000), is a Technothriller in which a source of deadly radiation under the Arctic may bring about ...
Ballou, William Hosea
(1857-1937) US author of several mild satires about social life in the American upper classes. His three novels of some genre interest are A Ride on a Cyclone (1889); The Bachelor Girl: A Novel of the 1400 (1890), which features a very fast motorized Balloon plus a romance; and The Upper Ten: A Novel of the Snobocracy (1890), in which a submarine Lost Race of mermen (see ...
Man or Astro-Man?
Rock band formed in Auburn, Alabama, in the early 1990s, core members being Star Crunch, Birdstuff and Coco, The Electronic Monkey Wizard. They might be Aliens who crashlanded on Earth, as they claim, or Brian Causey, Brian Teasley and Robert DelBueno. Musically recapturing the sound of the instrumental surf-guitar music of early 1960s acts like Dick Dale and the Chantays, but with an added punk gusto; they are steeped in sf influences, particularly 1950s/1960s ...
Politics
Most of the works which we can characterize with hindsight as Proto SF are political fantasies. The earnest and constructive aspect of this endeavour is generally displayed in Utopias, the mocking and corrosive aspect in Satires. The desire to make political statements has continued to be the main motive force in works of sf by Mainstream Writers, although modern ...
Adair, Gilbert
(1944-2011) Scottish literary theorist, critic, translator and author, in France 1968-1980, subsequently in the UK. His fiction has some fantasy interest, including his two Sequels by Other Hands for Young Adult readers, Alice Through the Needle's Eye (1984) and Peter Pan and the Only Children (1987), respectively sequelling Lewis Carroll and James Barrie ...
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 ...