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Sunday 16 August 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.
Site updated on 10 August 2026
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Crowley, John
(1942-2026) US teacher and author who also worked in documentary films and television for some time beginning in 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies established him as a figure whose work courteously but deeply stretched the boundaries of genre literature. / His first novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient galactic Deep, in which very few stars ...
Coon, Susan
Pseudonym of US author Susan Plunkett (1945- ), author under her own name of several romance novels, including contributions to Jove Books's Time Passages multi-author sequence of Timeslip and Time Travel romances; as Coon, she wrote the Living Planet sequence – comprising Rahne (1980), Cassilee (1980), The Virgin (1981) and Chiy-Une ...
Bilal, Enki
Working name of Yugoslavian-born Comics illustrator, film director and author Enes Bilalović (1951- ), in France from 1960; a very distinctive, innovative and original creator of sensuous, decadent futures. He attended the Académie des Beaux Arts briefly in the early 1970s. In 1971 he won a competition to create an sf Comic-strip story run by the magazine Pilote, in which he subsequently published ...
Sharp, Elliott
(1951- ). US avant-garde classical composer. A restlessly inventive artist, Sharp has released nearly a hundred albums (as solo projects or in collaboration with many other figures), a good number of which evidence interest in sf, broadly conceived; although without lyrical or deictic pointers, such an identification is arguable in some cases. Sharp is an aesthetically promiscuous musician who works with minimalism, atonal and noise-experimentation as well as elements of ...
Shiner, Lewis
(1950- ) US musician and author who began publishing sf with "Tinker's Damn" for Galileo #5 in October 1977, and who wrote a substantial number of tales before beginning to assemble them in Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (coll 1990), The Edges of Things (coll 1991) and Love in Vain (coll 2001). His Collected Stories (coll 2010) conveniently assembles more than half of ...
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 ...