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Thursday 24 April 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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Broderick, Damien
(1944-2025) Australian author, editor and critic; he had a PhD in the semiotics of fiction, science and sf with special reference to the work of Samuel R Delany. He edited four anthologies of Australian sf: The Zeitgeist Machine (anth 1977), Strange Attractors (anth 1985), Matilda at the Speed of Light (anth 1988) and Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction (anth ...
Lynds, Dennis
(1924-2005) US editor and author, most of whose work consists of detective thrillers written as by Michael Collins, the name he also used for his two Military SF adventures – Lukan War (1969) and The Planets of Death (1970) – each tale featuring cadres of despised missionaries who save civilization's bacon. Under the House Name Maxwell Grant, he ...
Main, Carol
(? - ) UK author of Young Adult novels, including the Fraser Family sequence, comprising The White Planet (1982), Planet of Evil (1983) and Planet of Adventure (1986), featuring lightly sketched Space Opera adventures on various planets; echoes of the Robinsonade are also lightly sketched in. ...
MacDonald, John D
(1916-1986) US author and ex-lieutenant colonel in the US Army, known mainly for such well-written thrillers as The Brass Cupcake (1950) and the twenty-one Travis McGee novels (1964-1985), which quickly evolved from seemingly escapist tales of derring-do, with strong hints of Ecological despair about the fate of Florida, into impassioned and savagely explicit laments for that state, for the planet, and for the human race; the nonfiction ...
Gu Junzheng
(1902-1980) Chinese author and translator whose handful of genre works represented the bulk, indeed almost all, Chinese sf published in the troubled 1930s, with the exception of Lao She's Maocheng Ji ["A Record of the City of Cats"] (1933; rev 1947; trans W A Lyell as Cat Country 1970). Gu was the son of a rice trader, and poverty curtailed his education after high school, although he subsequently became a primary school ...
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 ...