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Wednesday 11 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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Burkholz, Herbert
(1929-2006) US author who lived mostly abroad until the last decade of his life; most of his ten novels were detective thrillers like the first, Sister Bear (1969), some in collaboration with Clifford Irving. He is of sf interest for the Sensitives sequence – comprising The Sensitives (1987), Strange Bedfellows (1988) and Brain Damage (1992) – featuring the exploits of a team of Telepathic ...
Poisons
Assorted deadly substances form a subset of sf Drugs but often contain little intrinsic science-fictional interest: for example, "barbitide" in Samuel R Delany's Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the Dead City 1968) has effects resembling those of conventional arsenic, while the fast-acting "Divban rabbit-venom" mentioned in Roger Zelazny's ...
H P Lovecraft
Also known as "Lovecraft". US acid-rock band, named, obviously, in honour of H P Lovecraft. Their first two of the band's albums (H.P. Lovecraft, 1967; H.P. Lovecraft II, 1969) include a number of covers of songs by the Beatles and Moby Grape, but also two striking song versions of Lovecraftian short stories: the hallucinogenic anthem "The White Ship" on the former, and "At the Mountains of Madness" on the latter, referencing Lovecraft's ...
Lessing, Doris
(1919-2013) Persian- (Iranian-) born author, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) 1925-1949, in UK subsequently. Her long career – which eventually earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 – can be roughly divided into two broad periods. She began publishing stories in 1948, and from that date until the end of the 1960s she was best known for searching mimetic novels which acutely anatomized a range of topics, from the post-colonial role of ...
Whiteside, Thomas
(1918-1997) UK-born journalist and author, in USA most of his life; most of his work, like The Tunnel Under the Channel (1972), is nonfiction. Much of this is focused on Ecological issues, as in Defoliation: What Are Our Herbicides Doing to Us? (1970). He is of sf interest for the Near Future novel Alone Through the Dark Sea (1964), in which three narratives interweave, each based on isolation: ...
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 ...